Paul ain't dead

Former Replacements frontman/superhero Paul Westerberg has released a rambling lo-fi effort called 49:00 that's available on-line for the bargain basement price of 49 cents...all, apparently, in honor of his 49th birthday (yes, we are all getting old, aren't we).

In any case, Paul farting is worth 49 cents, so go buy it...now :
http://studio.tunecore.com/store/product/47

Dan Deacon is insane

And I like it.

I like the naked kid

I've always liked the cover art of Nirvana's Nevermind. An underwater shot of a naked baby swimming in a pool, chasing a dollar bill on a hook-and-line--that last bit Photoshoped or retouched I assume.

I have vague recollections of shimmying down a pole and touching the bottom of the pool at the Mont Clare YMCA where my mom was a swim instructor when I was very young. Though I don't remember this particular part, my mom tells me she regularly took me swimming starting when I was less than a month old and that I splashed around and made happy googly noises and spouted water. Except for the tantrums I likely threw when we had to leave, I imagine myself as happy as the little guy--peepee exposed and all--on the cover of Nevermind.

I couldn't find a swimming picture of me, but this is from the YMCA. I'm the unhappy clown in the center with the plastic pumpkin. My brother is the matching clown to the right and my mom is behind me. I'm certain I was wondering when I would get to take off the ridiculous costume and go swimming.

So it brought a smile to my face today when my cubemate Kevin directed my attention to a story on NPR's website about the kid on the album. He's 17 now and pretty much a typical teenager...and he must still like the water 'cause he plays water polo (the best team sport ever) and I like what he has to say. It's worth the three minute read.

First the Peach Pit, now this...

Art rockers Flaming Lips infamously played the Peach Pit, the rich kid rock club on Beverly Hills 90210. Now their music graces the soundtrack of Okie Noodling II, a documentary about bare handed catfish hunting in Oklahoma. A step up if you ask me.

Interleague Play Results

June 27, 2008
@ Chicago White Sox 10, Chicago Cubs 3

June 28, 2008
@ Chicago White Sox 6, Chicago Cubs 5

June 29, 2008
@ Chicago White Sox 5, Chicago Cubs 1

The Devil, You + Me

The Notwist's first album in six years--The Devil, You + Me--drops today in the US. Back in my WRRG days, Kurt Greisch put the amazing "Nothing Like You" on a comp tape for me and life has never been the same.

Notwist Retrospective:

Nothing Like You live from The Notwist (1990)

The Incredible Change of Our Alien from Nook (1992)

Torture Day from 12/Loup EP (1997)

Chemicals from Shrink (1998)

Moron from Shrink (1998)

One With the Freaks from Neon Golden (2003)

Pick up the Phone from Neon Golden (2003)

Bizzare Off the Rails video and the making of Off the Rails recording from Neon Golden (2003)

On/Off the Record Neon Golden documentary trailer (2004)

Good Lies from The Devil, You + Me (2008)

Perfect Speed from 13 & God, a Notwist and Themselves collaboration

Soft Alias another 13 & God song

They live!

Quite possibly the crappiest recording to ever give me goosebumps.

Emmy is STILL h-a-w-t

Age is irrelevant to the ever-hot Emmylou Harris. Quite the singer/songwriter she, as well.

Exile in Lizville

So Liz Phair is doing a limited number of live shows where she plays her classic Exile in Guyville in its entirety. While Guyville is one of my favorite albums ever, Liz hasn't done much for me since. The debut is raw and beautifully unrefined, while her subsequent recordings are--in my generally snobby opinion--increasingly overproduced and unoriginal.

In any event, I have tickets in hand for the San Francisco show on the 23rd along with mild hopes that I'm not dissapointed. Whatever she does, I am fairly sure she'll be better than THIS guy:


An...umm...interesting cover of Liz Phair's "Fuck and Run." Ah YouTube.

Liz Phair Exile in Guyville shows:
6.23 San Francisco, CA - Fillmore
6.24 Chicago, IL - Vic Theatre
6.25 New York, NY - Hiro Ballroom
6.26 New York, NY - Hiro Ballroom

Interleague Play Results

May 16, 2008
Chicago White Sox 2, @ San Francisco Giants 0

May 17, 2008
Chicago White Sox 3, @ San Francisco Giants 1

May 18, 2008
Chicago White Sox 13, @ San Francisco Giants 8

White Fright and Bike to Work Day

Bike to Work Day is kind of a little piece of Christmas joy to me. It’s not so much that I need a special occasion to prompt me to pedal to work—though today was my first such foray of 2008—it’s just the fact that I see other people get jazzed on what I’m into and it makes me happy. And yeah, I realize it may be the only day of the year they get on a bike, but that’s OK. As long as they get flashback of the simple joy buried somewhere in their childhood memories, then it’s a good day…anything more is gravy.

Since there are no photos of me in the white shorts (thankfully), I added this Bike to Work Day video from our good friends at Top Dog Illustration.

There was a nice article in Santa Cruz Sentinel this week about a woman who bike commutes and I liked the fact that it was just about a regular person who made a few adjustments in her routine and made it the norm. Usually the story is about some über athlete or über environmentalist crusader and I just think that kind of thing turns regular folks off. Anyway, I like the article so much I sent a note to the reporter saying so. Her response was very warm and thankful—I get the feeling the folks at the Sentinel get a lot of angry email shit. People are so brave from behind their keyboards. But I digress.

Since I had left my road bike in the office earlier in the week, I ended up riding my XC mountain bike in this AM. I thought it might be a bit of a struggle as 40 odd miles and 3,000 feet of climbing tend to be better suited to the former. I was pleased to be wrong. The Yeti may be a bit portly for road riding, but its high-volume tires did pretty well pumped to the max, and the suspension and disc brakes were a blessing coming down the ripple and pock of Mt. Charlie “Road.”

I started my ride in San Jose and met my co-worker Sean in Los Gatos to share the joy and pain and sunshine and (no) rain as we crossed over the mountains to Santa Cruz. He rode his cyclocross bike with—inexplicably—a backpack full of laptop batteries. Some things I just don’t question. I was happy he had some ballast to equal out the added heft of my MTB.

I also unwittingly made a strategically advantageous clothing choice—white cycling shorts. A perk from one of the magazine’s we advertise in, these babies are comfortable, expensive and Italian. Unfortunately, they’re also virtually see-through when combined with a little sweat. After, oh, ten seconds behind me, Sean mumbled something about “butt muff” and went to the front, I tucking in behind him out of the wind for the remainder of the ride. A few years ago I had vowed to never buy a pair of white shorts out of courtesy to my fellow riders...Dan O had rocked a similar pair of Castellis on a lunch ride, exposing his nether regions for the duration and raising both the ire and disgust of the groupetto. As if cycling shorts didn’t already offer way too much detail, making them white adds that almost naked Cirque du Soliel costume quality to them. But they were free…and I thought maybe they figured out a new method to make them more modest. Apparently not.

So now all that’s left is getting home. I brought in another kit so I wouldn’t have to endure swampass on the way back, meaning Sean won’t have to suffer the “white fright” of my shorts twice in one day. We will, however, face the steeper and longer climb up from the coast with miles already in the legs, along with near 100-degree heat. But it’s all OK with me. I love today.
----------
PM UPDATE 9:30 PM

Sean pays me back for my AM white short treatment by wearing an entire white kit for the ride home. You should be thanful that my camera phone can't adequately represent the detail of his hairy asscrack.

I'm finally home and my balls are killing me. No, not those balls...the balls of my feet. Though the former took a bit of a spanking as well. So I switched to my road bike for the way home and as we were climbing up Mt. Charlie's, my seat bolt snapped. Fortunately I stayed up and only slightly slammed my taint on the top tube/seat post, spanking my balls in the process. No permanent harm, but riding 20 mountainous miles without a saddle is not my idea of fun. Truthfully, it was only really bad on the unpaved sections where the bike bounced around alot and I would have preferred to have more weight on the rear wheel. The real killer was not my quads as I would have thought, but the balls of my feet that took a beating as I stood on them the entire way home. Oh well, at least I could still ride and I wasn't too slow.

I ended up making it back to the Silicon Valley Bike Coalition's Bike from Work event at Gordon Beirsche after it was over, but before all the people I cared to run into had left, so that was good. And I still love this day.

Molly Wins

It's official. Molly F now has the coolest bike in the office. Trumped are all the nanosquidnology carbon race bikes, superelastic boinger sleds, way-too-dandy fixies and that rust pile of a BMX bike Baker is working on. Her custom Superhero bike is art in motion...comic book art, painstakingly culled by Molly herself—an artist she, with an artist’s eye and temperament to boot—from volumes upon volumes of source material. Scanned, tweaked, outputted, remixed and arranged over the course of a month or two, Miss Molly sent off the art and a sketch to John Slawta, proprietor/builder/craftsman of Land Shark Bikes. He crafted her a stunning, lightweight steel cross bike...painted it with a sparkly white basecoat and applied the graphics all over, the covered it with a durable clear coat. As you can see the results are awesome. The coolest hero shot? The pic of her dad on the top tube riding his bike as a kid!

Personal Hygene Tip #763

Always brush your teeth after putting your contact lenses in. Doing the reverse may result in a painful condition known as Peppermint Eye Syndrome.

The wisdom of T2

Thanks Todd.

Jimmy eat crepe

I unfortunately won't be in attendance tonight, but the great Jim White plays the Crepe Place in Santa Cruz tonight...and he's got 10 miles to go on a nine mile road.

Blessed are the Peacemakers

Today marks five years too long.

Tag This!

The City of Santa Ana, California is down wit it yo.

And there's more!

A ride of solitude

Note: I’m trying to get this post down while the cement is still wet…so please bear with the bad grammar/spelling/thought processes/rambliness.

If you ever watch bike racing on TV you might have heard the announcers talk about a rider “turning himself inside-out” with a really hard effort. And on occasion I’d like to think that I myself have inverted my physiology in this overly dramatic hyperbolic way…pounding down the coast at 30 mph or charging up a hill in a tall gear or setting a relentless pace on a group ride. But I found myself inside-out in a different way on today's ride.

Riding one of my regular routes, I passed the spot where two cyclists were killed last weekend by a county deputy who had, apparently, fallen asleep at the wheel of his police car. It’s been all over the news and on my mind more than I care to admit. I knew the spot was coming up and I tried to steel myself to the sight of it…as I imagined there was a makeshift roadside memorial…photos, jerseys, water bottles, flowers, bike parts and other stuff all piled in homage.

Though only cruising at a casual pace, I instantaneously found myself short-of-breath and panicked. I was overcome by dread and fear and anger and an overwhelming sense of loss. Tears found my eyes and my heart felt like it would explode.

Next were thoughts of Bill, a co-worker who was killed by a truck last year on his bike. And Paul Clark, the brother of a friend who was mowed down out on Mines Road in the East Bay. And thoughts of the teacher killed on Mission Street in Santa Cruz last year and the kid on his fixie who died down near Seabright and the bastard who got out of his car and downed a beer after killing a guy on his bike last year on the Peninsula.

A scooter buddy of mine was clobbered head-on last week on Highway 9 by a goof who was speeding and overshot a turn, locked his brakes, crossed the double-yellow and, in fact, the entire lane of opposing traffic. Fortunately the car basically split in half and Josh “only” has two broken legs and a busted up shoulder and nine months until he can walk again.

And though it was a while ago, I still have visions of my best buddy Troy repeating himself over and over in a hospital bed after an SUV clipped him and kept going. He’s, thankfully, as back to ‘normal’ as he ever was.

But the fact remains that we are ever-fragile and delicate and exposed. Though we, some of us, look like Superheroes with our funny costumes when we ride, we are anything but. We have no Wonder Twin Powers or magic lassos or protective bubbles we can conjure up…in some cases don’t have any defense at all—not even a chance at an evasive maneuver.

Despite it all, I will not stop riding. I refuse to live a numb and muted life of fear. But I, however, want to do something about this shit.

I want to remind people that the comfort cocoon that is the modern American automobile is still a deadly if unintentional weapon that should be attentively and judiciously used. That the luxury which seems so alluring in cars equals insulation from reality and our fellow human beings. That we should not be using it as a phone booth, dining room, reading parlor or entertainment center. That we should consider what features might save somebody else’s life as well as their own like a smaller vehicle or anti-lock brakes or not putting shit on your car that eliminates its crumple zones—I truly believe that the crumple zone of the car that hit Josh is what saved his life and that the effective elimination of it on the police cruiser (it had a steel ‘grille guard’) added to the devastation in the bicycle collision.

I want to continue to work for more funding for bicycle and pedestrian safety; for bike lanes and trails; for driver awareness campaigns and rider education programs too. For us to stop pouring billions monthly into unjust wars and put it back into crumbling infrastructure and alternative intermodal transportation and under supported schools and law enforcement and services here at home.

I want riders to take off the fucking headphones—you need ALL of your senses ALL of the time. For them to ride safe bikes with real brakes and keep the fixed-gears on the track where they belong. And to follow traffic laws better and realize that riding is as much of a privilege as driving, even if it doesn’t require a license. Be predictable and visible and sensible. And wear a helmet—at work we get letters EVERY DAY from people who would otherwise be dead.

Yes, shit happens, as they say, and it always will. But some of it IS preventable. So please, let’s all slow down a bit. Let’s be more aware and less adversarial. I want it to stop. I don’t ever want to have to write a post like this about you. And I don’t want you to ever have to write a post like this about me.

Spring Training Baseball Results

3.15.08
White Sox 5, Cubs 3

Daily Distractions

Click on the pic.