Category: Words

When you’re out and about around the UK, it’s quite possible that you will have seen the word Gouranga plastered on a number of road and motorway bridges. I’ve always wondered what it was all about, as it has always seemed a bit Reeves and Mortimer to me and I’ve always forgotten about it about 30 seconds after reading it.

Anyway today I thought I’d try and get to the bottom of it, but I have to admit defeat and say that after a few searches on Google, I’m no closer to uncovering the truth. It seems that Gouranga is not some engineering company that maintains concrete bridges, which means that it is:

Either a publicity campaign for Grand Theft Auto game, where the award for sucessfully running down an entire group of Krishna followers was known as the ‘Gouranga bonus’.

Or it’s the Hare Krishna’s trying to get everyone to be happy and travel safely.

Either way it’s pretty bizarre, but why did they have to colour it in? Now it’s more noticable and annoying.

Australia’s mountian biking website 26 inches has launched its first magazine issue. It’s a mix of articles available on-line and those that are only available to subscribers via the CD edition. Read more over at the site.

Jim currently has pride of place as the background wallpaper on a certain bike shop computer with this interesting picture, to be honest I think this one is better (or should that be worse?). Now he can be seen taking his Soul out for a spin along with some other people who have bought themselves a new Soul.

This retro-revival thing is getting a bit out of hand…

From The Outcast: The Top Ten Ways To Aggravate Bike Shop Mechanics

1. On Friday say, “I need it for the weekend, I’ve got a race.”

2. Call them “dude,” “buddy,” “mate” or whistle to get their attention.

3. Start any sentence with “I was just” and demand a warranty on some broken part.

4. Walk in, ignore them, stick your bike on the stand and start lubing the chain and pumping the tires, claiming you’re “just giving it a once-over and I’ll be out of your way in a moment.”

5. Claim that all bike shop employees are on commission from Shimano when they say you need a new chain and block.

6. Bring in smelly, greasy, delicious food an hour before closing, and don’t offer any to the mechanic who has only had an out-of-date Clif Bar all day.

7. Say “Could you just….”

8. Borrow a tool, break it and return it without a word, hiding it under other tools to gain escape time.

9. Laugh at the poor state of their bike.

10. Go riding with them and expect them to deal with any mechanical. Or turn up unannounced at their house with a buckled wheel and no beer, donuts or salsa.

There’s more over at Bicycle Retailer. I’m off to Norfolk for a few days so there’ll be no updates for a while.

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October in the Lakes: More photos here

Well yesterday it was my birthday and I’m now another year closer to thirty than twenty, which is a little bit disappointing, but I’m sure I’ll get over it. I spent a fantastic weekend up in the Lake District, which made a welcome change to Manchester. I love it up there this time of year. There’s so much colour in the trees, even when it’s raining it’s beautiful.

This is new: kerb clothing. There’s some nice photo’s in there too. Click here for more.

Hope are pushing their new mono brakes at the North American market and who can blame them. The new kit looks stunning and if it wasn’t better than the current line up of Mini’s and M4’s they wouldn’t be bringing out. Guess that means that the new stuff has to be pretty incredible. Anyway Pink Bike have words and pics.

There’s some pretty big changes lurking on the Mountain Bike World Cup Circuit for next year. Mountain Bike Action have the report up on their site. Have to say I can’t see how it’s for the worse. It’s certainly good news for Fort William.

This is for SP who was wanting something worth reading on the Internet today. Lots and lots of expensive bikes and bike bits. All with one thing in common, carbon.

As well as some rather pimpy bike bits and some other fantastic gifts, I’m now in possession of Macromedia’s Studio MX 2004. Now armed with shiny new licenced versions of Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks and Freehand I’m hoping that there’ll be a few more changes to the site in future, once I get to grips with the changes that is.

Oh and the stickers have been ordered and are on their way…

Details of the 2004 Tour de France route were revealed this week. The mountain time trial finishing in Alpe d’Huez is going to be an awesome stage and one that many riders may not be looking forward to, even at this early stage. There’s the full story here.

I don’t like doing this too often, but this article from Bike Biz is just too good not to share. Now there may or may not be a conspiracy side to this, but either way it just doesn’t seem like Cannondale wanted to get any opposition to there technical findings on the recent QR and disc brake debate. The following article is from Bikebiz:

Mark LaPlant of Cannondale presented a disc-brake/QR/wheel ejection report to the ASTM Bicycle Committee at Interbike Las Vegas. He concluded there was no substance to the ‘Annan theory’ – see BikeBiz passim. In theory, the committee meeting was open to public scrutiny, but the notice publicising the meeting was “intentionally delayed”, says James Annan, responding to an official from the US safety standards commission, CPSC.

Following the worldwide furore over James Annan’s theory that – in certain circumstances – wheels can be be ejected from some disc-brake equipped bikes, the CPSC recommended that the ASTM Bicycle Committee, which
was to meet at Interbike should “take this matter under advisement for further discussion, additional testing and problem examination.”

Cannondale engineer Mark LaPlant was asked to supply a report for this meeting.

ASTM Committee meetings are open to the public and interested parties may contact the committee chair to
be included on the agenda. All well and good. But James Annan and Carlton Reid of BikeBiz.com, both of whom have been in correspondence with CPSC officials over the wheel ejection theory, were not informed of the meeting far enough in advance to be able to attend the meeting. Annan was told only when Interbike was already in progress. BikeBiz.com was not contacted at all, despite being at Interbike and able to attend the meeting.

Annan sees significance in the late arrival of the meeting notification.

In an email to the CPSC, he wrote:

“I’d always prefer to assume a cock-up rather than a conspiracy but it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that someone was keen to ensure that I did not find out about the ASTM meeting until it was too late for this information to be of any value.

In any case, I would be most interested in seeing a copy of the report that Mark LaPlant of Cannondale apparently produced for you, demonstrating that a properly fastened QR cannot loosen off. As you must be well aware, this runs contrary to much experimental, theoretical and anecdotal evidence, so it must be a very interesting piece of research. Since his report was presented at the ASTM meeting, open to the public in theory if not in practice, I do not anticipate that he can have any objection to it being placed in the public domain, and look forward to your earliest response.”

BikeBiz.com has contacted Cannondale to see if the company will release the report, I’ll be interested to see if they respond. Tell Cannondale what you think about their schoolboy tactics.

Well following on from the trail access issues discussed in this Singletrackworld forum thread, MBA has news of plans in the USA to bring in new legislation to tackle those trail users who abuse the system (the full original article is posted here):

Just three weeks after the bill was introduced in Congress, the House Resources Forests and Forest Health Subcommittee held a hearing on a proposal to crack down on people who willfully damage public land.

The bill, HR 3247, is called the Trail Responsibility and Accountability for the Improvement of lands (TRAIL) Act. It would create consistent standards for law enforcement on federal land and substantially increase the penalties on recreational users who willfully cause damage to public land. The fines would be used for rehabilitation, education, and awareness.

At the hearing, Mark Rey, U.S. Agriculture Department undersecretary for natural resources and the environment, and Larry Parkinson, U.S. Interior Department deputy secretary for law enforcement and security, offered support for the goals of the bill and offered to work with the subcommittee on the final language of the bill.

Present land access policies target political foes of the environmental movement, like mountain bikers and off road motorists, and most often result in sweeping land closures that punish all users for the isolated deeds of an outlaw minority. The HR 3247 bill, if used correctly, would penalize only those individuals or groups who choose to misuse public lands and not those who abide by land use regulations.

As fair as the bill’s intentions are worded, the reality is that it will be turned against mountain bikers to enforce the present wave of trail closures near US urban areas.

rothar.com bike stickers are overdue and I’m getting quotes for getting some made up. More news as and when they go into production.

Pink Bike sent some goodies over from Canada which arrived today. They’ve got news of a load of videos on their site at the moment, including the eagerly anticipated NSX7 and Fox’s documentary, Emergence. Plenty of North Shore riding there then. There’s also news of Wilderness Trail Bikes’ new kit too, more on the WTB kit here.

T-Mobile, formerly the German Telekom team are going to riding Giantbikes this year. Look out for some rather gaudy pink and black compact carbon bikes in the shops soon. Cycling news have some photos. Have to say those yellow and black ONCE bikes definitely had the better looks.

A little less conversation, a little more action please…

I’ve had Hed Kandi’s Deeper CD for a few months now but haven’t listened to it much, because I’ve only just realised that there is a Steve Lawler track on it called Rise ‘In which is a remix of the chilled out Reef song, Mellow. Damn, I haven’t listened to those guys in a long time. They’re blaring out the speakers now though.

new howies stuff out now

The government are having to consider the Nation’s position to genetically modified crops, a decision that could have potentially devastating and irreversible implications. Why? Well because they don’t want to upset the US biotech companies who have spend billions of dollars developing a technology that no one really wants and arguably needs.

Now I’m pretty reasonable, I can see that there may be advantages brought to us by this new technology, but my concerns are centred around the fact that research has not properly tested the long terms effects. It might be okay to say, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) pose now long term medical implications, look at America, they’ve been using them for years.

Well it just ain’t long enough. Look at smoking. Everyone thought that was a pretty good idea at the time. Then rates of lung cancer soared. What other bright ideas? Well how about feeding processed meat to cows, a creature that is designed to eat grass. What do we get? Mad cow disease and CJD in people who eat cows.

Okay there was some choice in both of those options. No one forced you to smoke or eat beef. GMOs are different. Cross pollination with non-GMO is not going to leave people with a choice. How do you stop pollen from plants contaminating natural stocks and how can you offer people an alternative such as organic produce one this is the case?

These people are potentially messing with the environment in ways they and many other people do not fully comprehend. Meanwhile the front pages of the newspapers and television reports are talking about sensationalist crap like David Blaine. They need to get some perspective.

Red Bull Rampage anyone? Results up here.

And Charly Wegelius, what are you playing at? Busted.

Big weekend. Lots of catching up with old friends over beers. Slight problem with memory loss on occassion and no riding. Ah well, there’s plenty of time for biking ahead.

Singletrack have put together a fairly comprehensive coverage of the new Race Face kit, not surprising that they’ve done that given the sponsorship they now seem to be carrying. Guess there’s some fairly big bills to be paying to run that site. Big Jonny has been paying his bills by other means and ones that aren’t always acceptable with some people.

Seems there were a fair few big names to be seen at Interbike, there’s some photos of the stars up here. Worryingly, Corty looks very like David Miller. Here’s some of the best kit I’ve seen from the show in this gallery from Cyclingnews.

Giant HQ in Nottingham was broken into on Thursday night and a load of bikes stolen from the warehouse. Bit of a bummer, but if they want to find them they should start looking in the Meadows, it’s the sort of place that they’ll start turning up. Bit like our shop and the bikes being seen all over Salford. Not sure how professional it was, but you can bet that Giant will have insurance for such things and potentially it could have been a lot worse.

Busy around here right now. Conrad is okay, but has a sore head and fingers that are recovering from being broken. He was lucky, his bike wasn’t. It’s a write off.

Biker is back in the UK from Switzerland and is heading up North to the bright lights of Manchester tonight, as is my sister. It’s going to be a full house and a bit of a session tonight. My liver and kidneys are going to be feeling it tomorrow.

The shop website has been up and down and back to it’s old self before returning to normal over the last few days. The hosting server it was all sitting on packed up apparently. Bad. Back now though and the custom build up section should be appearing soon, more here.

Conrad was knocked off his bike tonight by a reckless driver. I picked up the wreckage from the Accident and Emergency Unit at the Manchester Royal Infirmary earlier on. Fortunately it looks like Conrad is going to be okay. His bike might not make it. More news soon.

Everyone has coverage from Interbike at the moment. Try Singletrack, Bikemagic and Cyclingnews for starters. There’s loads more on each of those three sites if you do a bit of surfing.

Shiny new kit everywhere. What’s hot? Well Race Face have been keen to do this before anyone else thought of it and who can blame them? The spiel is:

The new Race Face X-Type bottom bracket and crank system uses outboard bearings and a hollow pipe spindle (think along the lines of XTR and ’04 XT), but the Race Face offering permanently attaches the left hand crank to the spindle. Should be available in XC, “All-Mountain” and DH versions.

Also new is this Virtual Pivot Point Santa Cruz, the VPP-Free, fitting into the long travel freeride market in between the Blur and V10. Pink Bike have lots of photos and early thoughts on the beast.

And Shimano have been having some technical difficulties with their new XTR wheelset. MBA cover the problems and the fix here.

I’ve been doing a bit of (re)design work on the shop website based on a revision I knocked up a month or two back, the new look is here.

Well it had been planned for a few weeks and finally for a few of us, today was a shop staff ride. Well it was supposed to be Conrad was there, but when we called to pickup George from Cambridge from his digs in the leafy suburbs of Manchester he wasn’t out of bed and the verdict was that it was probably unsafe to move him. SP didn’t show up, presumably deciding that riding with a bunch of mountain bikers on springy full suspension bikes would do his credibility no good at all and it seemed opted for the delights of the club hill climb.

Anyway we rode out from Chorlton along the banks of the Mersey on the Transpennine Trail towards Stockport, later taking in such delightful parts of Greater Manchester such as Reddish Vale and then Broadbottom, Hyde and into Glossop. This is where a seemingly well laid plan was exposed to be not quite so well thought out, as the prospect and reality of riding 35lbs of fully active suspension bike up and over Chunal is a bit different to riding a road bike.

Conrad of course disappeared over the horizon in no time and eventually even I managed to grind to the top and then descent down to the Bridleway up and over Middle Moor and past the Shooting Cabin, before descending down to the Kinder Reservoir. It was a bit blowy up on the tops and most of the slog up across the fields towards Brown Knoll was against the wind.

On the ride up Oaken Clough, we bumped into a guy who had just taken a spill on the descent and was recovering from the aftermath. Fair bit of blood, but his Giro seemed to have done its job. From Edale Cross the fun began as we rattled down Jacob’s Ladder and rolled into the station cafe without (too) much drama. After a good 5 hours on the bikes and some good miles put in, tea, bacon butties and chips were well received.

This is a bit off the wall.