Category: Words

This looks like a fairly good place to start this update.

From: The Darwin Awards
Subject: Surprise Attack Surprise

(3 January 2005, St. Maurice, Switzerland) It was the first week of a weapons refresher course, and Swiss Army Grenadier Detachment 20/5 had just finished training with live ammunition. The shooting instructor ordered the soldiers to secure their weapons for a break.

The 24-year-old second lieutenant, in charge of this detachment, decided this would be a good time to demonstrate a knife attack on a soldier. Wielding his bayonet, he leaped toward one of his men, achieving complete surprise.

But earlier that week, the soldiers had been drilled to release the safety catch and ready their guns for firing in the shortest possible time. The surprised soldier, seeing his lieutenant leaping toward him with a knife, snapped off a shot to protect himself from the attack.

The lesson could not have been more successful: the soldier had saved himself and protected the rest of the detachment from a surprise attack. The lieutenant might have wished to commend his soldier on his quick action and accurate marksmanship. Unfortunately, he had been killed with one shot.

Normally I’d talk bikes here, but most of the stuff I’ve been looking at recently has nowt to do with bikes at all so it’s not a particularly bike orientated post at all. Well apart from the fact the best saddles in the world just got even better – check out the Bel Air RL. So I guess that’s the saddle for the new IF sorted then. Oops guess I let that one out of the bag eh?

The Independent Fabrication family has grown and there’s a shiny new addition to the collection. If I was like the characters in Dear Wendy I’d probably have names for them all but I don’t. At the end of the day they’re bikes. Very nice bikes, but not as valuable as people and especially someone you really love and care about. Bikes can always be replaced, people can’t be. Anyway this particular new bike is still languishing in a fairly big cardboard box awaiting some fairly fundamental components to bring it to life, pictures will follow when it lives.

I read this a while back and it sounds like a pretty good idea. How many times do you wish you could watch that show you missed when you were late back from biking at the weekend:

From: Steve Malone, MacUser
Subject: BBC to offer legal free downloads of TV shows

The BBC is to allow British online users to legally download TV and radio programmes from the Internet up to seven days after their transmission. The announcement was made by Mark Thompson, the BBC Director General, in a speech at the Edinburgh Festival over the weekend.

Under the plans announced by Thompson, it is hoped that the new service called MyBBCPlayer will be launched next year. In addition to recently broadcast material, the BBC also hopes to include more of its archive online as downloads as well.

With some programmes, the BBC may go one step further. As well as offering downloads at the same time they are broadcast, some shows may even become available online before they appear on TV. In a pilot, the BBC Three comedy The Mighty Boosh has appeared on the Internet before TV. The corporation says that the comedy Titty Bang Bang, the sitcom ‘Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and the Johnny Vegas vehicle ‘Ideal’ will be made available on the Internet first.

The BBC has already trialled a service of radio programmes and was surprised when it put the Beethoven symphonies online and received over 600,000 downloads.

The programmes are to be limited to British online users – who finance the corporation through their licences only. The BBC says it has gone to some lengths to ensure that Internet users from the US and elsewhere do not get a free ride.

The move is likely to infuriate online purists who will say the point of the Internet is to allow access to content from anywhere in the world. However, the BBC is looking for additional ways to add value to the licence as the government is currently scrutinising the licence system as part of the charter renewal process.

That said, the move is also likely to inflame those who say that the BBC will be encouraging the so-called ‘digital divide’ of those licence payers who will benefit by having a broadband connection and those who do not.

And Finally

From: Mike T
Subject: A Little Chuckle

A Jelly Baby walks into a bar and starts talking to a smartie. After a few beers the Smartie says “Ere, a bunch of us are heading to that new club, fancy tagging along?”

The Jelly Baby says “No mate, I’m a soft centre, I always end up getting my head kicked in”

“So?”, Smartie says. “Don’t worry about it, I’m a bit of a hard case, I’ll look after you”

Jelly Baby thinks about it for a minute and says “Fair enough, as long as you’ll look after me”, and off they go. After a few more beers in the club, three Lockets walk in. As soon as he sees them, Smartie hides under the table.

The Lockets take one look at jelly Baby and start kicking him, breaking cola bottles over his little jelly head, lamping him with little sugary chairs, and generally having a laugh. After a while they get bored and walk out.

Jelly Baby pulls his battered Jelly Baby body over to the table and wipes up his Jelly Baby blood. He turns to Smartie and says “I thought you were going to look after me!” “I was!” says Smartie,” But them Lockets are f**king menthol”

So two weeks without Internet, massive deadlines at work and a whole heap of stuff going on in addition to moving house equates to not enough time for website updates.

Mikey T sent me this link. It’s the Channel4 trailer with alsorts of TV people saying their favourite swear words. Not really safe for work. well not unless you’re having a REALLY bad day…

From: Michael Moore
Subject: Vacation is Over… an open letter from Michael Moore to George W. Bush

Friday, September 2nd, 2005

Dear Mr. Bush:

Any idea where all our helicopters are? It’s Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.

Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren’t there to begin with?

Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn’t want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don’t like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!

I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don’t let people criticize you for this — after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?

And don’t listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers’ budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn’t cut the money to fix those levees, there weren’t going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them — BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!

On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn’t stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.

There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.

No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It’s not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C’mon, they’re black! I mean, it’s not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don’t make me laugh! Race has nothing — NOTHING — to do with this!

You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.

Yours,

Michael Moore
www.MichaelMoore.com

P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way. Maybe you can catch up with them before they get to DC on September 21st.

Meanwhile Blair has been accused of slating the Beeb by that Murdoch. It was front page news over the weekend in some of the papers interestingly, the BBC tucked it waway on their website.

Sure enough at 3.30am on Saturday morning some barking mad Scottish folk fueled by the products of the finest distilleries in the land left an incomprehensible answer phone message telling me what a great evening I was missing. Wish I could have been there it sounded like a good time was had by all up in the hills above Glentress.

Planning for the inaugural rothar.com (in association with ifrider.com) transalp is now progressing nicely. The countdown has started to next July when the lucky few will be escaping from the UK to head out to some of the best big mountain riding in Europe, to cross borders, pass over cols and drink cold beers at the end of dusty alpine days. I’m looking forward to it.

News in the world of bikes includes the fact that Bontrager is going to produce some carbon rimmed mountain bike disc wheels following on in the footsteps of the likes of HED and ZIPP. Quite how they’ll hold up to boulder fields remains to be seen… Meanwhile SRAM is getting geared up to hit the road market.

More graffiti with a message here.

How illegal is it to vandalize a wall if the wall itself has been deemed unlawful by the International Court of Justice?

The Israeli government is building a wall surrounding the occupied Palestinian territories. It stands three times the height of the Berlin wall and will eventually run for over 700km – the distance from London to Zurich.

The International Court of Justice last year ruled the wall and its associated regime is illegal. It essentially turns Palestine into the worlds largest open-air prison. It also makes it the ultimate activity holiday destination for graffiti writers.

_ _ _

spot the difference

There been quite a lot happening recently in Europe. in the alpine regions there’s been torrential rain, which has transformed areas that are usually safely enjoying 35 degree heat into dangerous and waterlogged places. In the thick of it all the rothar.com Swiss correspondent has some photos and a rather good insight into the character of certain individuals:

From: Suzi
Subject: Remind you of Manchester?

I can imagine you and Chris being this stubborn somehow 🙂

More photos here

Swiss television has shown pictures of bridges that have collapsed, huge chunks of caved-in motorway, farms swept away by mudslides and people being evacuated by boat through normally busy city streets. Electricity was cut off and drinking water contaminated in several parts of the country and many villages were isolated as roads were swept away and railways stopped their services.

Meanwhile Portugal is being toasted by wildfires that are burning out of control and are decimating a country which despite normally having some of the highest average annual temperatures in Europe does not maintain any contingency plan for dealing with fires. Firefighting aircraft from France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy have all joined the efforts against the fires this week in answer to a call to help. Quite why Portugal does not maintain a fleet of water-carrying planes isn’t stated, but things aren’t looking good.

Meanwhile in the North:

From: MacPuppy
Subject: Groof woof yip gruff awooooooooooo !!!!

roughly translated : no I don’t fecking know when I’m going yet but the window of opporchancity to sneak in a last bivvi is closing as StuN will be sloping off to find some fruity trails in Sept and I might have been shipped out to the land of smellee cheez an onions by the time he returns. Ghostdog is also being exported – to the land of burning cottages so his time in the glorious North (no that’s the proper North) is also fading fast. Callum vanished without trace ages ago …. will he make it out to play ???

So a cunning plan has hatched – contraflow bivvi this friday night at Glentress.

Meet at the bottom car-park around 8pm … beyond that who knows but I’m thinking of stashing the bivvi gear in a car at the buzzards, riding light for the contraflow and then rendezvous’ing (note my command of the new tounge already) with buzzards before sloping off into the deep tree’s with our phones/hipflasks/cake – usual script.

Roll down to the hub in the morning for a full-on hubba bubba breakfast.

Who’s in and who’s satelliting ????

who have I missed ????

Mentalists. I of course have opted out of such lunacy (well this time anyway), but am fully expecting a whiskey fueled phone call in the middle of the night if they can get any reception. A bit more notice next time guys?

The singlespeed worlds have happened. Find out how the big event in Penn State went down over at Singletrack.

Finally read this and remember Jason McRoy. I’ve updated my page here.

First up an email from Ben:

Thats it all done. Finally got some stuff on the blogspot page. All of my canada 2004 photo’s, check it out and leave a comment if you want! www.westcoast100.blogspot.com

Looks great to me. Must admit I’m tempted, but I would definitely need some peer pressure to commit to some of that riding though! My efforts at the Ewok Village at Glentress have not convinced me of my North Shoreness.

It’s quite clear that Ned Overend doesn’t know how to retire, which for mountain biking is a good thing because he’s a bit of a character. Inaugural World Champion, he quit in 1996 at the age of 41, then joined the fledgling XTERRA off-road triathlon circuit and scooped up a couple of their World Championships before retiring again in 2003. Steve Medcroft catches up with Ned to talk about life at 50 for Cyclingnews.

Another Mountain Bike legend Keith Bontrager has had a bit of a shocker in his attempt to conquer the seven day long TransAlp Challenge. Read Keith’s accounts here, unfortunately it didn’t all go quite to plan…

Now Stateside the Leadville 100 has just taken place and for the first time in a long time I’ve been over to check out what Big Jonny has to say about things. thought he’d be back for revenge and sure enough revenge was involved, but the Gringos got the better of Big Juan’s bodily defences and almost finished him off. He has an epic write up of his race over at DC and the Gnome has more over at Onespeeder…

On the day that they have announced a rise in alcohol related deaths it seems only fitting to say something about bikes and booze…

Cycling on steep mountain trails will beat you up and wear you down. Through a long day of such activity, there is no better medicine than water to keep the athlete’s body functioning at its optimum level. Yet, wine has its rightful place in the realm of trail-riding… More at Dirtrag

Three weeks to go and I’m moving house. Reality is starting to take hold. It’s not going to be pretty! There are various implications, not least having to move several years of accumulated deliveries from Amazon. Fortunately however the new flat is well equipped with book cases. I wonder if I will find any hidden trails?

So over the last few months I’ve been a little bit busy on the website front and not content to be doing it all day at work, I’ve been roped into doing a bit of extra coding. The result went live last week and is the Independent Fabrication on-line store. Check it out here.

Not going to make it to Pennsylvania and to be honest I’m a bit disappointed…

Bikeage ’05
Prime the pump for the SSWC’05

As promised, there will be a loosely organized, unrelated-to-the-official-event, low-key, pre-SSWC05 ride/beer drinking event for those coming through, and/or living in and around Philadelphia. Even if you don’t plan on attending the big event, come out and join us in Philly.

Bikeage ’05 will meet on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway (you know…where Rocky ran up the steps in all his steroid-induced glory) at 2:00 pm on Friday, August 19th. From the Art Museum steps, we’ll head to the local trails for a rally-style ride and a sampling of some of the Keystone State’s finest beer. Afterwards, the festivities will continue at Tattooed Mom’s [530 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147, ph# (215) 238-9880)], a bike-friendly watering hole on the much over-hyped South Street. That’s right…more beer (and food) at one of the finest establishments on the “hippest street in town.”

The folks at Tattooed Mom’s will be offering us one-geared folks a $3 Yards ESA special, as well as 50 cents off of any food and drink. If that’s not enough to get you to the bar, we’ll also have some fabulous door prizes…even for the Canadians.

After that, you’re on your own. We’re doing this event early in the day to allow you (us) enough time to head out to State College on Friday night. Aren’t we thoughtful? It’s only about a three and a half hour drive from Philly, but we encourage you to stick around Philly until Saturday morning if you’re out sampling the sauce on Friday.

If you do stick around on Friday night, we suggest checking out a cool punk rock show with Del Cielo / True If Destroyed / Belaghost at Space 1026 (1026 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA) put on by the ultra-righteous R5 Productions. See here for more info

There’s been a spate of tagging wars going on recently and the walk into work is a fairly interesting gallery at the moment. Check some more urban artwork here.

This is a great website for people looking for new fonts for making stuff. Why has it taken so long to find larabiefonts?

A while ago I linked posted something about Spinner forks. These are the lightest suspension forks on the market at the moment with a titanium, scandium and magnesium construction that ways little and costs a lot. There’s now a Spinner USA website up here so you can check out the Aeris forks in a bit more detail. From what I gather Spinner have been making forks for a certain big manufacturer for a few years (take a look and see if you can work out who, it’ll probably only take one look at the all mountain Echo and you’ll see the resemblance with another popular fork). Spinner’s previous own brand kit, In-Sync, has never been much to write home about, other than the fact it seemed to replace RST as the OEM fork of choice on sub £500 bikes.

Now this is a great website: derailleurhanger.com – What an original and simple idea and it serves a real and useful function, especially for those hard to get parts. As Matt Biskup, the genius behind the company suggests:

Please shop by the pictures, not the data. If you don’t see your bike on this list and would like our help locating a derailleur hanger for you, please email us at: info@derailleurhanger.com and we’ll try to locate one for you.

One way to really help us is to email a digital photo or two of your derailleur hanger and/or the dropout of the frame if that’s all you have. If you can’t do digital photos, simply place the derailleur hanger on a regular photocopier and fax the copy to (678) 530-1052 with your name on it and bike info.

We have located hangers for Look, Litespeed, HM and many other brands that aren’t up on the site yet with this method. Our intent is to make this site the single point for cyclists to find derailleur hangers on the web.

The parts on offer are professionally engineered and are stronger than one that came from the original manufacturer and therefore can take a bigger hit than a standard hanger. If like me you have a penchant for wrecking hangers these bad boys may be just the ticket.

So what is new in the wonderful world of bikes? Well the honest truth is not enough from my perspective so I’m doing some home work at the moment with a mind to organising something for next summer. High mountain supported epics are in order and once I get some answers back from people invitations will be going out… Will it mean a new bike and is this the answer? Or maybe one of the new carbon Specialized?

Hidden in the depths of the visually inundated and swamped Bike magazine website, there are actually some good columns with people talking about bikes, check them out here.

Another great American magazine, Dirt Rag has recently had a website makeover by the looks of things either that or it just looks different. Check out some more talking about bikes in the Brain Farts section.

There is also a stunning gallery of photos, although not very big pictures, from endurance rider Mike Curiak who won last years great divide race. As Mike says:

Singletrack Archive finally updated with a listing for Issue 22. IMBA membership renewal in the post. Shopping and beer drinking to follow. 2006 Specialized here and here – it’s looking carbontastic. Trying to be retro is getting an expensive habit.

Biking tomorrow in the mountains.

It’s been a long time since I had time to sit down and write an update for the site and the fact that the desk around me still looks like a bombsite is testament to the fact that I’m still not really back on top of things and the honest answer is that things will probably get worse before they get better. So maybe around October I’ll get back around to doing normal updates. Maybe. Normal updates and riding bikes by October. Sounds good. Not sure if I can wait until then though.

So what’s new in the world in the last two and a bit weeks? Probably the most important bit of news is that to celebrate the arrival of Archie who will be keeping an eye on Simon and Christina from now on. It’s a cracking bit of news and by far eclipses the fact that some guy called Lance has won a bike race in France. Not that the latter really comes as a shock to anyone I suppose, well possibly other than to Mr Armstrong. The rest of the pack will probably be glad he’s going and will have their fingers crossed that he doesn’t do a Cipolini. I’m going. No I’m not [cue return and world championship victory]. Right this time I’m REALLY going. No I’m not. Yes I am, no I’m not [cue fade into obscurity with loss of form]…

So what else has been happening? Well after years of being blown up because political policy was of deep dissatisfaction to certain paramilitary political elements in Northern Ireland, London and other major UK population centres are now once again the targets of bombers disgruntled by current foreign policy and treatment of people they relate too. Isn’t it strange that when you do things like this in the name of war then try and sweep it under the carpet and gloss over it as “an unavoidable part of the hideous nature of war”, that at some point you’ve killed the relative of someone who is actually going to seek revenge in a way that you might not actually like. Blair is far from reality if he truly believes there is no scope for comparison.

Whatever Blair says about this not being related to the war in Iraq, it doesn’t take a degree in politics to work out that there is an apparent relationship here. Maybe they’ll set up an inquiry – because they’ve been proven to be a successful wy of getting to the bottom of things in the past haven’t they? Remember WMD? The fact is this. The UK wasn’t not being bombed by apparent Muslim extremists before invading Iraq, but we are now. the Spanish seemed to get the message fairly quickly, so how many more innocent people have to die before the message gets through? You have to wonder, are we really becoming so American in our attitudes that we shoot first and ask questions later?

Enough politick. Check this from Jed: Are you still riding that dull looking Titanium frame? Maybe you need to brighten it up a bit…

Now there used to be a regular section on the site a couple of years ago where I used to say what was on the stereo. Well after watching Live 8 and seeing The Who perform, i have to say I thought that they stole the show. After that I, like many thousands of others, suddenly realised what they’d been missing and kitted themselves out with some classic rock and it was only after watching the Live 8 performance that I realised that it’s actually ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again” that forms the iconic theme to CSI. Doh! It’s been great to see many of the bands sharing the benefits of participating in the event – it won’t satisfy everyone but it’s a gesture in the right direction.

Also flowing out the speakers is some classic St Germain, a bit of the Man in Black, Johnny Cash and some revival from the collection of Kieran Hebden’s alias Fourtet. Word is that he is coming to the capital of the North soon. Sweet.

I think this is a fair way to finish, because whatever you do I’m sure you can relate to this:

A cowboy was herding his herd in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”

The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure. Why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to
get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop
and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry, and after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1586 cows and calves.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says the cowboy. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the cowboy says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?” The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”

“You’re a consultant.” says the cowboy.

“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required,” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew; to a question I never asked; and you don’t know anything about my business. Now give me back my DOG.”