Six stale peanut butter sandwich cracker stacks lined up so so on the LSB loading dock railing bro. The crow snatched one and headed for the nearest puddle to soak it just a bit before she ate it.
This has been the latest installment of parallel lines on a slow decline… … …We now join your regular routine already in progress.
This is not the handlebar I happened to have sitting around. This is a klunker bar. A belated Christmas present. At MSRP it’s about twice as much as I paid for the complete RockHopper at BikeWorks when Obama was in the whitehouse.
This bike has been built up like this for years with 3 or 4 or 5 different handlebars. None of them felt quite right. Kinda halfass with what happened to be sitting around. The klunker bar pulls it all together. It just feels right. Heavier than all get out. A metric shit ton of steel. It's a 1991 RockHopper bro.
I’d like to draw your attention to the $5 price scrawled by Andy Voight on the best brake levers in the world.
Not that I’ve ridden it much. But a brief Saturday morning spin in the rain was enough to feel that feel. The just-right-feeling feel. So anxious to get out and ride it, my left grip slipped off when I dropped the curb. A true test ride rookie mistake. I didn’t crash but it kinda woke me up. I will get the grips to grip before I really ride the shit out of it.
I shimmed out the 25.4 clamp diameter into a SUL Salsa stem with a strip of aluminum cut from a Warchild can. Why Warchild you ask. Because that’s the beer I was drinking at the moment so I sliced up a shim with a fresh IPA residue on it leaving just a hint of a millimeter peeking out so I know that you know that I know that you know I shimmed it out with a beer can.
It takes a lot to get me to wrench on a bike these days. It takes something special to get me to scrape up enough giveashits on a Friday night after a week of commuting to work in the winter and working in the vicinity of bicycles for 40 hours to want to wrench on my bike. But I dove into this klunker last night wearing my new Free Range shirt.
The other day I was digging around in a drawer looking for a Jason Hanson rookie card when I pulled out this little mini pocket notebook from 2004. It traveled in my messenger bag when I was working at Seattle Legal 20 years ago. Perhaps I could write it down. Wrote it down. Writing it down. Writing it down again. Same shit, different decade.
Yesterday I was walking down the street when I saw a guy that got a t-shirt from me seven or eight years ago. But when he washed it, the paint washed out. So I made him another one. Same thing happened. I was dumbfounded. Making hundreds of t-shirts over the years, I never had that problem. It took me quite a while to figure out that the fixer I was using expired and wasn’t fixing anything I screened onto shirts. The fixer additive has a well-defined shelf life and then it becomes worthless. However, you can heat-set the paints into the shirts in the absence of a fixing agent, which is much more labor intensive, but it does the trick. I sort of explained the gist of it to this guy and asked what size shirt he wears, but I remembered he wanted the fish needs bicycle. Last night I made him another t-shirt and today I will be heat-setting the shit out of it and then hand-delivering it in a Tyvek® envelope. Third time's a charm.
one day some way somewhere along the final fifty fucking feet of 2022 I got my hands on a Sprüth Magers holiday card featuring an Anne Imhof image Sprüth Magers doesn’t fuck around or half-ass things. This is an 8” x 11” harder than hard cardstock high quality piece of recycling and I’ve had it on hold in a pile of scraps to upcycle until the other other day when I slapped a gold cow on it. I’d like to mail it to someone as a giant postcard while weighing the pros and cons of $7 in stamps and waiting in a long line. In the meantime, I took a picture to make it last longer.
Jason Hanson went to Mead High School in Spokane where he was voted All-City as both place kicker and punter. He went on to WSU and kicked ass for 4 years punting and kicking. Then he was drafted in 1992 in the second round by the Lions. He played 21 seasons, 327 games for Detroit (both NFL records) and he scored 2150 points. If the Lions didn’t suck for all those years, all those games, he’d be the all-time leading scorer in NFL history. He’s #4, which fits him well. word
BSA cranked out tens of thousands of these paratrooper bikes from 1940-45 . British soldiers hopped out of airplanes toting them. You’ll find plenty of enthusiasm for them on the internet.
In Ireland about the same time, Flan O’Brien wrote The Third Policeman but couldn’t find a publisher. So it sat around until he died in 1966 and was finally published in 1967.
A few moons ago Keith suggested I read The Third Policeman. And now I’ve finally gotten into it. I’m about 66.6% through the book and I will not ruin the story for you but I recommend it. I also recommend you learn more about Flan O'Brien, just one of the pen names Brian O’Nolan used. Read his wiki page but don’t read the Third Policeman page, it gives up the whole book.
This bone shaker piece is worth reading and will not destroy your potential book experience.
That $3 painting from Ye Olde Surplus Shoppe found a spot on the wall at Big Time and today I got a photo to prove I was there. But we all know happy hour is just a point of view that’s neither here nor there, it’s marketing in the eye of the pint holder transitioning seamlessly.
These photos remind me of Bret, because it is Bret and he took them. But they also remind me of those guys down at DANK bags who made the top tube pads some years ago with fabric that was silk screened at pw HQ. Bret has the ability to keep old stuff looking good. That batch of top tube pads went out mostly to messengers and got trashed within months.
