Wednesday Comes But 52 Times A Year

Emails!  Yeah, I get them.  This is a cutting-edge blogging operation I'm running here.  I fire up the AOL, my modem makes a crazy screeching sound, and in pour the electronical missives.  Every day it still seems like a miracle to me, as though God Himself is making pee-pee right into my computer.  Then I forget that there is no god, only Lob, and I flagellate myself for my impudence.

Anyway, here's a subject line that topped an email I recently received:

The Budnitz got angry and Hulkified?

And here's the picture that came along with it:

Yes, that what happen when Budnitz get angry.  In fact, it looks like The Budnitz has burst out of its fenders like the Hulk bursts out of his shirts--that is, if the Budnitz had had any fenders in the first place, which it didn't.  Either that, or it could just be The Budnitz on HGH.  Regardless, having expunged the The Budnitz and its infernal ticking from my life, I feel a sense of relief, like when you extract a deeply-lodged booger, the kind that feels as though it's rooted somewhere on your frontal cortex.

Also via "God's pee stream" comes this short video via a reader with the improbable and likely fictitious name of "Paul Bowen:"


Jauregui from Jacky Durand on Vimeo.

Mon dieu!  (Or lack thereof.)  I had to watch that about four times before I could finally see the sleight-of-bike, and it puts yesterday's failed triathlon transition into stark perspective.

Speaking of perspective, a number of people have informed me that some baseball guy has had a boneheaded bicycle crash and managed to fall down the only hill in Manhattan south of 110th Street:

Fortunately, in lieu of using his brain, he had encased it in a piece of styrofoam:

“I shouldn’t have been reading a text while I was riding,” he said. “That’s the wrong thing to do. But at least I was wearing my helmet.”

"I shouldn't have been pleasuring myself while driving," said the man who drove through a sidewalk café as he reached climax.  "That's the wrong thing to do.  But at least I was wearing my seatbelt."  Evidently wearing a helment has finally become a license to completely fuck up everything you do on a bike.  I wonder if we'd see better bike-handling if helments were banned from triathlon.

Moving on, recently I was browsing Twitter (if email is God's pee stream then Twitter is His post-urinary drip) where I saw that the Giro d'Italia was having a little caption contest:

The New Yorker reader in me wants to go with "I now pronounce you husband and husband, you may kiss the Cav," but the perennial child in me keeps shouting "I'm gonna fingerbang you like a stage win."

You can probably guess which one won.

Meanwhile, in Portland, an anti-fascist group is organizing a boycott against a local bike co-op:

Because they claim the founder is a racist, and in particular that he hosted a talk given by a "white separatist:"

The 2009 dust-up revolved around Calvert's hosting of a controversial white separatist Valdas Anelauskas at a local bookstore. Calvert ultimately apologized for hosting Anelauskas and distanced himself from the Lithuanian-born activists extreme views about race and other topics. The issue died out, but it has now come roaring back. RCA points to a recent picnic organized by Calvert that included a guest the group calls, "an individual deeply connected to antisemitic, white nationalist, and militant anti-choice organizing."

I was quite ready to dismiss this as typical Portland hysteria, like maybe they overheard Calvert trying to do a Katt Williams routine for his co-workers and took it out of context.  So I went to the organization's site to learn more:

Anti-racists first raised the issue of Calvert’s antisemitic organizing in 2009, after Calvert and his cohorts in the Portland 9/11 Truth Alliance hosted a speech by Valdas Anelauskas, a racist organizer who proclaims that evidence for the Holocaust is “shaky.” Citybikes mishandled its response during 2009, making excuses for Calvert and declaring that no problem existed after Calvert issued a bogus apology, even though Calvert’s organizing against Jewish people continued unabated. In September of this year, anti-racists again drew attention to Calvert’s antisemitic organizing. In particular, we noted that Calvert twice gained venues for Fritz Springmeier, an antisemitic author convicted of bank robbery charges alongside a white supremacist accomplice. (Springmeier’s 1997 robbery plot also involved detonating a bomb at an adult video store as a diversion.) Footage of the Citybikes President giving an extreme antisemitic speech was also pointed to at this time, and Rose City Antifascists provided an extensive chronology of organizing by Calvert and his Portland 9/11 Truth Alliance organization. 

And then I looked up this Valdas Anelauskas guy, and wouldn't you know it, he does actually sound like a boner-fried racist and Jew-hater.  For example, here's his take on the history of the Holocaust, which he says is "shaky:"

Holocaust critics persecuted

In his rather hysterical June 20 letter, Bob Bussel decries any questioning of Holocaust history as a “profound act of intellectual fraud and moral bankruptcy,” a “loathsome and repugnant monstrosity.” 

British writer George Orwell said that “who controls the past, controls the future,” and our perception of past events alsoshapes the way we look at the world around us today. The Zionists understand this, and know that the story of the Holocaust is crucial to their power. 

This is why such harsh measures are being exacted against those who ask too many questions. The Holocaust history seems so shaky that governments have to actually imprison people who openly question it. 

Today, it’s becoming more like the new state religion and, as in the Inquisition, people are being locked up again for questioning even the smallest detail of dogma — no matter what the evidence, no matter what the conflicting testimony or history. Anyone who breaches this faith will be deemed a “Holocaust denier,” and punished accordingly. 

Therefore, as I see it, the “standard” version of the Holocaust history simply cannot be trusted as long as they’re jailing or otherwise punishing those who question it. To make jail sentences be your response to critics is exactly the same as getting up on a rooftop and shouting as loud as you can for all to hear: “I am lying!” Is anyone supposed to believe someone who, in effect, proclaims in this way that he’s lying? 

VALDAS ANELAUSKAS - July 5, 2008

Pretty creepy.  Oddly though, Portlanders, who would probably boycott a café for serving milk from a cow that wasn't milked orally, seem mostly to be shrugging this one off--at least that's the way it seems in the comments on the BikePortand article.  Alas, this is the one time their batshit hypersensitivity might actually be warranted, but instead they're just arguing about the correct definition of "fascist."  Not that the shop should be driven out of business or anything, and I'm sure everybody there is wonderful (with the possible exception of the guy who organizes racist talks in his spare time) but Portlanders could at least write some more of their trademark outraged BikePortland commentary, or maybe organize a "The Day the Clown Cried" theme ride:

(Oy.)

That seems appropriately tone-deaf for Portland.

Moving on to technical news, an enterprising person has launched a Kickstarter campaign for a bicycle crank shaped like a chicken leg:

The quest to reinvent the bicycle crank is nearly as popular and quixotic as the quest to reinvent the bicycle wheel, and in this case the green pie is supposed to show you why the Z-Torque is better:

In other words, it compensates for the fact that you're riding a department store mountain bike.  Still not convinced?  Here's a race between a bike with a regular crank and one with a Z-Torque crank:

This proves conclusively that the Z-Torque produces the same effect of selecting a different gear.

Or, if you've got lots of money to invest but you're more the "patron of the arts" type, why not fund a documentary about LSD?

Here's the pitch:

THE PITCH

The story of Dr. Albert Hofmann is an interesting one -- an unassuming Swiss botanist, who very purposefully created LSD, then very accidentally spilled it on his hands, and evidently wound up being the first to learn of it's psychoactive effects. BICYCLE DAY is a fictionalized retelling of Dr. Hofmann's story and famous LSD-induced bicycle ride, combining live action sequences with digital and hand drawn animations from animators all over the country. It's a home-grown, nation-spanning, locally-produced, mind-bending, eye-opening, trippy-good time of a film and we want each and every one of you to be a part of it with us.

Or you could just watch this:


Turn on, tune in, be nonplussed.

Lastly, by way of turning my attention back to the Biennial Whatever-It's-Called-Cockpit Contest (sponsored by Knog, Australia's largest and most powerful mega-corporation), I'd like to share one I spotted recently:

Which is clearly evil:

Or good, since I guess it's not upside down.  I'm a little hazy on my adolescent satanic imagery.

Then, there's this collagen bar tape, submitted by a reader::

As well as this submission, which is isn't really a cockpit at all:

(Uh, wrong end.)

And finally this one, which I frankly found very refreshing:

Garmin, schmarmin.