Large Fella on a Bike

Dollar Shops & Fried Chicken

I remember the first time I saw or even heard of a dollar shop.  I was home visiting my folks for Xmas in western PA back in the late '80's.  I was horrified.  What the &^%$ was a "Dollar Shop, I asked myself while driving by it.

It sounded so, Cheap.

All I could figure was that everything in it cost no more than 1 dollar.  Doh, right?  How did something so cheap and proud of being so cheap come into being, and especially... in MY hometown?  I was bugged & bothered by it.

Now in 2005, the dollar shop, discount shop, .99 cent store, everything for a buck, whatever it's called in your neck of the woods... is as prevalent as McDonald's... one on nearly every corner of virtually every town.  Where we live-urban/big city-they are everywhere.  Within a one mile radius of our home we have counted 11 of them.  Eleven!  On one street alone, there are 4 and 2 of those are beside one another.  How's that for competition?!

Now here's the weird part.  They are sort of, kind of, great in their own perverse way.  Lemme 'splain.

Ever need items like a mop, plunger, bucket, broom, superball, jacks, playing cards with semi-naked Chinese women... ok, maybe not the last 3 items (who knows?) but there is some actual shit to be had from these emporiums of cheapness.

I mean after all, do you really give a shit if your toilet brush came from a store called "Everything for a Dollar" or "Target"?  It's the same brush with the one exception that the one from Target costs more because the store is fancier.  If a Target could actually ever be called, Fancy.

I would even go so far as to say that the cheap discount store is one of the last strongholds of America's credo of Freedom Of Choice.  The choice to not suck the tit of corporate big business.

Which reminds me, up the street from us there is this new place called "Hollywood Chicken".  Great name!  Cracks me up.  It's run by two brothers from the Middle East which must be a tricky thing around here... folks are still fairly freaked about folks with olive skin and dark hair in these parts.  Beyond the name, it took me a couple weeks to get the nerve up to go in the place... you know, risking badly prepared food, contamination, etc... all the stuff that makes for the gift that keeps on giving long after food has been consumed.

Well we did finally go in...

Beyond the fact that the two brothers speak better English than 99.9% of the locals here and that they won't own up to my questions that they must have been employed by KFC at one time or another... these 2 cats have got the chicken thing down.  D.O.W.N.  Cold rocked.

The Outside, crispy as a ducks ass on a beach in Mexico and The Inside- as tender & juicy as anything coming out of a house below the Mason Dixon line.  The breading is light, moderately seasoned & spiced (enough to be there & noticed and not so much that the chicken itself becomes a secondary thing) and fried perfectly whereby it's not greasy at all.

If you've ever tried it, making fried chicken is a bitch.  It's extremely arcane and mysterious in its nuances and finer points.  Everything from flour and seasoning to oil type and temp... from chicken being cold or room temp prior to frying to soaking the chicken in buttermilk or not... it's all part of the learning curve and it isn't easy.  Trust me.

Not only do these guys have the chicken happening but they've also nailed the accoutrement thing too.  Mashed taters & gravy to slaw, biscuits to shoestring fries or best of all... their kickin' potato wedges (think huge potato cut into just 4 quarters, dredged in seasoned flour and fried in oil until the outside is crispy and the inside is soft and as cloud like as a perfectly baked potato)... All which smoke the offerings from ANY fast food emporium period.

Does this too mean that someday there will be a Hollywood Chicken on every street corner and mall food court? 

Let's hope not... because it will then surely suck.

A Requiem

I can recall vividly the many discussions that Amy and me had when we began talking about extending our own little corner of the populace.

Man did we have some plans.  The whole enchilada was gonna be different, better, bigger, more this and more that.  Yada, blah...

We were going to be the parents of the millennium.  The new model for greatness in all things Parenting.

Hah!

Last night while making sloppy joe's, roasted potatoes and sauteed asparagus for dinner I looked over at Amy and said, "Isn't the reality of shit sometimes so brutal?"  She looked up at me a bit confused as to what I was talking about so I explained further.  "How the hell does a person go, in just 5 short years, from Sparkles, Moonbeams & Happy Happiness to the reality that you mostly suck as a parent & husband?"

She smiled.

My day yesterday involved the following-

1.  While crawling back into bed to wake Chloe & Amy up, accidentally resting my knee onto the curtains over the bedroom window and pulling down the entire window treatment... curtains, panels and all the rods.  Huge gobs of direct sunlight came streaming through the uncurtained window whereupon both Amy & Chloe started yelling at me.

2.  Chloe started screaming out in the kitchen because Angus-our cat-bit her (she was teasing him yet again) while I was standing at the toilet taking a leak.  When she started screaming I quickly turned to look out into the kitchen and while doing so preceded to pee all over the back of the toilet and wall.

3.  Chloe asked for a skateboard to be bought now.  I said we'd think about it and maybe consider one closer to summer.  She looked at me and said that I was "no longer her good friend" and stomped away into the living room.

4.  Amy started telling me something about the Pope's current medical condition and when I said that I had already heard that too she looked at me and said, "I'm so sorry that I'm boring to you" and walked out of the room.

5.  Chloe wanted popcorn chicken for lunch and when I put a plate of them in front of her for lunch began sobbing and saying that they would make her "Bominit".  Bominit is her word for Vomit.

6.  Chloe gave me a Shrek gummy bear and told me to eat it.  I thanked her and did.  15 minutes later she came back and asked me for it.  When I told her that I ate it because she had told me to she started crying and saying that she wanted "a dad who was serious and didn't tease".

7.  Amy asked me what we were having for dinner and I suggested a few things but said I couldn't really start until some dishes were clean not only for cooking but to make room so I could cook.  She looked at me and said, "I am so, so, so sorry you think I keep us in some kind of a filthy home" and left the room.

8.  Chloe asked for chili for dinner and I told her that we were having it tomorrow.  She cried and said I "didn't lover her".  After I made a small batch of chili for her and placed it in front of her she started crying and said she wanted a cheeseburger.

9.  My dad called and during the course of our tense conversation told me, "I was a disappointment as a son".

10.  Amy wanted a back rub while we watched a movie and about 10 minutes into it said, "you rub my back how you want your back rubbed not how I want mine" and moved off the sofa and into a chair.

11.  When I was getting into bed our cat, Angus, reached out from under the bed and bit me in my Achilles tendon.

Less Is More... or is it?

For instance with my blog... I don't want to become a "News Source" per se. 
Nothing wrong with that and I see that many fine folks use their blogs for just that. 

For me, I don't want to rehash shit that I just can find on Yahoo or Google under the News Tab and Cut-N-Paste the stuff into my blog by itself or make a little extra effort and write some clever shit around the myriad of Cut-N-Pastes.

I've had a couple news item type posts so far and I gotta say, I sweated them... they bugged me because I felt like they were cheating myself out of digging in the dirt of me.  Sure they were 'related' to my thing but they were too easy on me and my psyche to mine.

The Cut-N-Paste is becoming epidemic in the land of blogging.

It's like, "He/She, whom writes the most posts wins".  Fug that.

I've always been a Quality over Quantity sorta guy.

I don't want my blog to become just "something else that I need to get done to feel good".

So I'm going back into my gray matter to start slow brewing up some stuff that'll leave my fingers tired and my id emptied.

I want to share who I am-or am becoming-and not be that guy at the party who can only talk about crap that was in the morning paper... those cats always left me feeling like they had nothing to offer up about themselves.  Or, was it that they had exactly that much to offer in the first place?

I want some Connection.  I want to connect with me...

Honey, it's time to call a Therapist

Was having a perfectly great nap yesterday when upon waking I started piecing back together a dream I'd had... I shouldn't have.

 

I recalled having a dream about Tommy Lee (of Motley Crue fame, Pamela Anderson fame, brushes with the law fame & more fame) and Bruce Gordon (of touring cycle framebuilder fame, maker of touring bicycle racks fame & famously legendary curmudgeon).

All 3 of us were hanging out at Tommy's house in Malibu just sitting around his kitchen table sipping a freshly juiced mixture of carrots & granny smith apples.  All of a sudden Bruce starts going on about how Tommy really messed up a good thing when he lost Pamela Anderson to spousal abuse and not being in control of his temper.  Tommy is just sitting there, shades perched on his forehead, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, sweaty glass of juice halfway between the table top and his piehole.

Bruce just keeps going on and on and won't stop.  I'm sitting there watching this and getting nervous because I've heard a lot about Tommy Lee's famously flash temper.  Bruce will NOT stop.  He just keeps berating Tommy... not so much about abusing his then wife but how dumb it was because she was so hot, so busty and looked so great naked.

Tommy finally sips his juice and then drops his smoke into the glass.  The glass is still half full.  You can hear the soft "sizzzzle" of hot cigarette coal get drowned in carrot & apple juice.  The whole kitchen is silent except for some wind chimes which can be heard through the open  sliding door which leads out onto the deck.

Bruce looks over directly at Tommy and says, "What?!".  Nothing, Tommy just keeps staring at Bruce.  Another, "What?!" from Gordon and still nothing but those damn wind chimes.  Tommy, who is sitting there in jeans, biker boots, a ribbed-sleeveless t-shirt resplendent with skinny arms covered in hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars of Ink, slowly brings his shades down and onto his nose-covering his expressionless eyes.

Bruce says again, "What?!?!!".

Nothing...

Finally the silence is broken with the sound of, it takes a minute to recognize it for me, Motley Crue's famous song "Looks That Kill" being softly played by a computerized orchestra that must be his doorbell.  Tommy gets up and leaves the kitchen to answer the door.

As if picking up from some other, earlier conversation that I didn't know we ever had, Bruce Gordon looks over at me and says, "So... that's why your idea to use 26 inch wheels with a bottom bracket that low is lousy.  It's just plain dumb... stupid really."  He pauses to take a long pour of his juice.

Bruce and me both hear Tommy off in the distance talking to someone. 

Bruce reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a folded piece of paper.  He reaches into his other shirt pocket and puts on a pair of old, '70's style, thick, large eyeglasses with faux tortoise shell frames.  After slamming them back onto his nose he quickly unfolds the paper, flattens it out with both palms and slides it over in front of me.  It's a penciled diagram of what looks like bicycle wheel rims.  There are grids, numbers, angles... it looks like something an architect would use.

I stare at the paper for a moment out of curiousity and then look at Bruce.  He quickly leans back into his chair and folds one leg over the other.  He sort of grins at me.

We can hear Tommy still talking to someone...

Bruce keeps looking right at me.  Finally in my total discomfort I say, "Cool, looks good".  Bruce uncrosses his leg and snaps the paper away from in front of me and refolds it.  He licks one edge of it and I swear I can hear him mumble, "Jackass", under his breath while slides it back into his right breast pocket.  He starts winding his wristwatch really quickly... aggressively and then looks up at me and says, "You know, you're just like all the other jackasses I deal with you know?".

I can't imagine my face looking anything different than a Doe in bright headlights on a dark country road at 1am.

He continues, "I'm showin' ya complete brilliance and all ya gotta say is "COOL"?!?!  You're a dork.  How you like that?  DORKO.  These are WOODen rims asswipe."  Every time he uses the word wooden he really emphasizes the word "Wood" and kinda lets the "en" fall off. 

Bruce then says, "WOODen rims that are made to measure, full custom WITH my signature hand-burned into each and every one of them!  Gawd, you're a jackass".
I stumble out some kind of verbal apology which he ignores...
"All you jackasses want something new and here I am giving it to ya and all you got for me is COOL?!  COOL?!  These are WOODen touring rims... first ever!  These are gonna set the world back a few feet dumbass.  WOODen touring rims in 2 SIZES!  650b and 26!!  How's that?!"

And with that he starts laughing hard... really hard.  Like an insane kind of hard.

I slowly get up from the table and while Bruce is still laughing I make my way down Tommy's hallway toward what I hope will be the front door, where I can hear Tommy's voice getting closer.

As I round a corner in the hallway I stop in my tracks as I see Tommy Lee standing in his doorway engaged in an impromptu session of fornication with a female United States Postal Service employee.

She still has her leather mailbag on her shoulder while her grayish blue standard issue shortpants are around her ankles.  Tommy, who is standing behind her doing "the business", has an ashtray resting on her back while he holds a cigarette in one hand and a cellphone pressed to his ear in the other.  He's talking into the cell and saying something about "child support" and being "tapped out this month".

I wake up at this point.

 

Newsflash: We've officially poisoned All cultures

As if there weren't enough reasons already to hate Americans & the crap we spread worldwide like McDonald's, General Motors and Baywatch... now it's MTV.

It seems that MTV has launched an African version of its utter shit cable channel into & onto the tv screens of the folks in Africa.

Yes, the last & final sign of the 7 Horsemen of the Apocalypse has arrived as we will be seeing village folk gathered round the communal television in traditional garb singing along to some bloodclot like Ashlee Simpson.

Maybe the first video aired to kick off the network will be ToTo's "Africa"... seems just about corny & tasteless enough.

Have we no shame?

Read the sordid details here

"Hi, like I'm sooo ethnic too!!"

And you thought a Rivendell took a long time?

Recently there's been a fairly longish thread going on about wait times for a custom Rivendell on the RBW List.

I just came across this article about this fellow from India who just completed a bicycle made entirely from wood.

A couple highlights were, "2 year to complete 2 wheels", "13 months to prepare a bell", "the chain took almost 2 months" and the "handlebars & mudguard took 2 months each".

And folks thought a Rivendell, Sachs or Baylis took a long time?!

Next up for the Indian guy, a wooden car. 

I can see his monthly newsletter to loyal customers, "Deposits are currently being taken with delivery estimated in 2021... "

Read the whole deal here

Multiple bike owners... ur own3d!

I found this newsclip through another blog called BikeLog  and was fascinated by it. 

A Gent by the name of William Wagstaff, who is 95 years old, just recently retired his beloved 75 year old Evans bicycle.  Up until a recent accident had upset his confidence-of course it HAD to involve a car-he had ridden his bike 2 to 3 times per week.

Mr. Wagstaff on his bicycle.

The bike was purchased new in 1929 for 14 british sterling pounds (that's $27.00 by todays inflated & rather sad exchange rate) and he retired it with 80,000 km on it (appx. 50 thousand miles!)... of course the frame was made from, you guessed it, STEEL.  One of his secrets for success with it was, " ...soaking everything in oil to preserve it".

Reminds me, I should go buy a can or two of JP Weigle's Framesaver.

Here's the story

Uptown BOB

Tom Sanders of iBOB List fame and who has tirelessly been conducting business with an Amish family to supply top grade leather for handlebar wrap has put up a couple page tutorial/pictorial on how to wrap your bars in moo-cow-hide correctly...

**Warning**-NOT for the faint of heart (or Vegan's) there is a lot of cow ass on display in the following link-You Have Been Warned...

Here be the pages to see it all

Let there be Leather

Celebrate thy Youth!

You know you're old when the images on the tabs of LSD you once dropped in your teens & 20's  have now become collectable artwork.

The Full Story...

And here's a cycle-related one that goes for $850.00 smackers...

Large & In Charge

Being large and completely out of shape isn't fun but there certainly are exceptions to this when it comes to riding a bicycle.

For instance, the first time I hauled my fat ass onto a Brooks saddle early last year the simple, unbridled thrill I experienced was amazing.  The feeling of moving efficiently was unparalleled... of being able to pump the pedals a couple turns and move forward so quickly was fantastic.  Sure, this was before the reality of how bad the saddle made my sit bones scream, how numb my wrists & hands became from the stem & handlebar setup... how my legs quickly felt like two big slabs of pork fatback filled with lactic acid and simply didn't/couldn't make another rotation of the pedals before I had to take a break, standing next to my cycle, bent over the top tube, arms-one over the handlebars the other over the saddle, knees shaking and legs on fire. 
But hey, ya gotta start somewhere!

My first part of my first ride was exactly 2 blocks before I needed, no, HAD to take a break.  My knees and legs would simply not pedal any further.  My wife, Amy, who is in much better shape than I needed a break too.  Her freshly purchased, Nashbar, el cheapo cyclometer looked up at us and in its own LED kinda way said to us, "How sad, you two just rode a whopping 0.4 miles at 3.9 mph". 
Yeah?  So what... we were riding!

We went everyday... actually every night for our ride.  At first it was "The Spot"... the part of the block where we needed to stop that first night.  Could we make it there again, further... how much further?  We measured our progress not in miles or even half/quarter miles but in-how we felt at "The Spot" and then eventually, "How far did we get past The Spot?".

By the 4th evening we flew by "The Spot" and actually made it halfway to the Hudson River-what was to quickly become our "New Spot".  Amy's cyclometer would read precisely 0.9 miles at the halfway point each and every night.

We always made it to the "New Spot" every ride from that 4th night on before taking our first break.   The break itself, we figured out, was becoming less and less necessary.

One month went by until our first break would be had at the Hudson River with Amy's computer reading 1.5 miles.  I took our camera that evening because I just knew we were not going to stop until we made it to the Hudson River.  It was, "in the air".  The night was ball-numbing cold, Amy and me were so excited we underdressed and didn't really notice it however Chloe reminded us the whole way there from behind Amy's Bridgestone 400 in her trailer, how cold it was.

Here's that moment captured in a photograph...

And here's Chloe's reaction to her Mommy & Daddy's big 'breakthrough'...

Quickly we figured out that they absolute best way to enlarge our ride times without breaking was to ride often.  Doh, right?  To two mostly sedentary people these lessons come slow and at a price.  The price was, we'd take a day or two off from riding and then go for a ride only to quickly find out that it was a bit like starting over... not that different than the first night with needing more breaks and earlier too.  Also, that our legs felt heavier and less able to go further... and that our sitbones hurt more quickly.

We were fast becoming aware that the way to go was to go often.  Not the easiest thing to do when 1) you're used to being a person who naturally sits on their arse making excuses, and 2) when work schedules change often and you have a-then-4 year old who has "other" plans for an evening.

We needed to keep doing this and needed to figure out a way to accomplish it.

As usual, it was complicated.

I recall having read somewhere that *any* big change in an adults life only becomes routine after no less than 3 months.  Much less for Teens and Pre-Teens.  It was some kind of medical/psychological study.

We're still trying to figure out how to ride everyday for 3 months so we can, too, experience real change.  Our last week of cycling netted us a total of 50.2 miles for those 7 days, the longest ride was 10.8 miles, our average speed was 9.5 mph and our fastest speed was Me: 19.9 mph and Amy: 14.7 mph.