The Wind in Kansas Blows

I rode today, and got my first taste of a good old fashioned Kansas thunderstorm. I checked the radar twenty minutes before I left, and there was absolutely no precipitation in all of western Kansas. A few minutes into my ride I could see some dark clouds off to my left, and what looked like a tiny patch of rain. An hour later, there was a crazy ribbon of thunderstorm so dark it looked as though it came from Mordor itself  stretching across the entire sky. Because it's Kansas, and there's absolutely nothing to impede my view for hundreds of miles in every direction, I simply rode around the thunderstorms, and remained dry for my entire ride. I'm still counting myself as lucky however, as the speed and severity with which that storm simply emerged from a clear sky was worrisome at best -- I'd hate to get caught on the wrong side of one of one. Upon returning, our NOAA weather radio spent almost half an hour alerting us to the nearby tornado warnings, and to the nickel, quarter, and even golf ball sized hail being reported all around the area. Imagine being stuck in the middle of some wheat field in Kansas, wearing nothing but spandex, in the middle of a golf ball sized hail storm. Fuck, right? 

As for my bike -- it rides beautifully, Thud Buster seatpost and all. It is so wonderful to have a new bike -- everything on it works! The headset is silky smooth, the drivetrain is snappy and silent, the shifting and breaking are clean and precise. Nothing creaks. Nothing! Granted, I'd rather be on my own saddle, and be riding a road seatpost, but honestly, I'm just happy I can ride at all. I'm so grateful to Dan, my savior in Pratt, for loaning me something that works! Dan and I have a ride planned for tomorrow -- we'll be going through the towns of Coats, Sun City, and River City. I'll try to bring along a camera....

Some Things Aren't Meant to Be Lived Down

So I had a layover in the Denver Airport earlier today. I was on my way to Pratt, Kansas to visit my mother. I was in the middle of crafting a blog post about how outrageous airports are, and how fucking ludicrous it is that I got charged $175 to get my goddam bike on the plane, when I check my e-mail (thanks to DIA for having free Wifi) and find the following message:

Question: what really sucks about paying $175 for your bike to get it on the plane?

Answer: forgetting your seatpost/saddle at home in your bike repair stand.

I hope Pratt has a good bike shop. I'm headed to Fedex today if you get desperate.

Sent from my iPhone

Well there it was. This, mind you, is my new Blue Rc8 -- my BRAND NEW, FRESH OUT OF THE BOX BLUE Rc8 -- my first new complete bike since 2004. I finished building it yesterday, and because it was raining, didn't take it outside (it's a crime to get a new bike filthy on her maiden voyage!). I rode it on the rollers for a bit to adjust my position, and then packed my brand new bike into a travel bag (sans seatpost and saddle of course). Thanks to the fact that our Blue bikes come with standard sized 27.2 seatposts, I decided to at least try to find a loaner post in Pratt (the notion of paying for overnight shipping now a lot less appetizing after getting totally reamed by United Airlines earlier in the day).

Once we arrived at my mother's house, my mom called her cyclist neighbor and asked if he had a seatpost and saddle to loan me. He didn't, but he called his cyclist friend, and a few minutes later Dan, this crazy, scruffy-lookin' guy with a custom-made pedal platform to compensate for his 2-inch leg length discrepancy, and what appeared to be 30 year-old spandex showed up at our door with a saddlebag full of seatposts. Yes, he did have a seatpost that fit me, but brace yourself, and don't say I didn't warn you:


I give you the Thud Buster. Horrifying, I know, but it fits goddamit. And it's free.

Co-fuckin-rection!

So apparently there were some errors in the results from this weekend's Carnation Time Trial #2. Yeah -- remember how I said that Hagens swept the (would be) podium -- that still holds true; however, the ORDER of the top three riders shuffled slightly. For some reason, when the results were originally posted, Adrian and Nick's times were 30 seconds lower than they should have been, while mine was accurate. After the correction, that puts me in second place, thank you very much. TAKE THAT CLAYVILLE!!!! Now Adrian and I are tied for the series lead, with James "I'm going to pinch and twist your nipples until you cry real tears" Stangeland lurking a mere 6 points back despite going off the course (twice!). 

Also, Nick and I are eagerly awaiting our new amazingly fast-looking Blue TT bikes, so maybe next time we can be even closer to Adrian the Hungarian Barbarian Humanitarian. We can't wait -- hurry mr. postman, HURRY!!!

Glider Bison's Favorites

I'm going to start a new series of posts about my top-five favorite websites. 

This first one will be about my favorite music websites. Check this shit out:

5: Seeqpod

This is a search engine for playable media. Type the name or artist or album or whatever, and Seeqpod comes back with a list of embedded MP3's, ready to play. It's highly useful, if you already know what you're looking for, but it's not the best place to explore new stuff. 

[NOTE: they're not up right now, but should be back soon] 

4: Pandora

Most people already know about the wonders of Pandora, but if you don't, you should. Pandora is basically a radio station that adapts to your tastes. You start by asking it to play a song you like, then Pandora selects other songs from different artists you might also enjoy. You give Pandora feedback (thumbs up, or thumbs down) as to whether or not you liked Pandora's offering. The more feedback you give, the more accurately Pandora nails down your particular taste. This is a really smart idea, and is a great way to find new music you'll undoubtedly like. 

3: Daytrotter

This website contains the output from a single recording studio located in Rock Island, Illinois. Apparently Rock Island is along the tour rout for the majority of touring bands in the country. A band will swing through town, drop by the studio for an hour or two, lay down a few tracks (often on borrowed instruments), before getting back on the road towards their next gig. The songs are usually well recorded, and delightfully stripped down, and best of all,  Daytrotter makes all the songs available for full download. They feature a new band every week, and offer new MP3's every day. Enjoy. 

4: Pitchfork Media 

When it comes to indie music, Pitchfork is a heavyweight. In fact, it's the heavyweight. They do it all: music reviews, news, exclusive content, interviews, etc. With their new listening software, Lala, you can listen to every song mentioned in the entire website -- but only once -- after that you gotta pay. In my opinion, the video portion of the website is particularly impressive. The music videos are high-quality, but you can find those a lot of places these days (vimeo for instance). The coolest videos are Pitchfork's exclusive live concerts. They're so well captured, both in terms of audio and video, that they capture a fairly honest and intimate snapshot of what that artist is like live. There's something so enchanting about witnessing musicians at work; this is (obviously) most true when seeing someone perform live, but even through he lens of recorded video, an inkling of that magic can be felt. 

5: NPR's music site

NPR has an amazing music site. They dig up amazing content from across every genera, and from around the world. They also produce lot of wonderful work themselves, including tons of exclusive concerts, and some very well produced podcasts. I've been listening to NPR's All Songs Considered and All Concerts Considered podcasts for over a year now, and I'm never disappointed. One cool thing they do is offer upcoming albums in their entirety, before they're released in their Exclusive First Listen series. These records are available for a limited time, streaming over the internet sometimes weeks before the album can be purchased in store (no that ANYONE buys music in store these days). For instance, right now you can hear the entire new John Vandrerslice album, AND the entire new St. Vincent album. How sweet is that? 

If anyone out there has other cool music sites that you visit frequently, leave a comment, and let me know!

Morse Ike Ailing Noose

In Fort Collins:

WHITMAN TOTALLY CREAMS EVERYONE!!!!
Men: 3rd in the TTT
Women: 1ST IN THE TTT!!! FUCK YEAH!!!!

OVERALL OMNIUM WINNERS!!!!!

GO WHITMAN!!!!!!!


In Italy (giro spoiler alert):

Cavendish -- your snarky words of two days ago will BITE YOU IN THE ASS YET!!! My money says he gets no wins in that pretty pink jersey.


In Belgium:

Tom Boonen's latest excuse for the cocaine in his urine? "I was so blacked-out drunk that night I don't remember jack shit -- let alone doing any coke." Remember kids, this isn't a drama, it's a musical comedy, and Tornado Tom doesn't have a coke problem, he has an alcohol problem. Way different.

Who knows what else Tom did whilst in the middle of that full-blown black-out -- maybe Tom's lucky WADA doesn't test for things like STD's, UPI's (unidentified party injury), or embarrassing pictures of Tom Boonen with wisps of white powder around his nose, wearing nothing but a pirate hat, ski goggles and a freshly pissed-in world-champ skinsuit, slumped in a horse trough, barfing straight into his lap, all while Stijn Devolder and three naked hookers laugh uncontrollably in the background (we're still waiting for those to surface on the internet -- keep your fingers crossed).

In Washington:

Adrian the Barbarian continues to rampage his way across the Northwest racing scene, scoring his 9th(??) win of the season. Hagens Berman would have swept the podium (if there had been one): Adrian took first with a record time of 31:18, Nick Clayville second at 32:21, and I was third at 32:28. Boo Yeah.

FUCK YEAH KENDI!!!!!

Kendi Thomas is the new Div II Women's National Criterium Champion!!!!!

(and probably on the podium for the overall omnium)

Nice work Kendi, way to keep alive Whitman's history of having the fastest women on the face of the collegiate cycling planet! 

I count one Star'n'Bars jersey for whitman so far -- something tells me there will be more. 

Psychal Eng Noose

Down in Ft. Collins: 

Men 1's Road Race: Adrian got 6th, it sounds like that was the hardest-earned 6th place in history. I won't give you the full details, but let's just say it involved a five-minute solo bridge, a twenty-minute solo bridge, and getting dropped a lot towards the end. Hat's off Adrian -- once again -- you're a hardman. 

Men 2's Road Race: Whitman's Duncan McGovern took 9th, and all the boys finished in the points. Didn't see the race, but sounds like it was brutally windy. 

Women's 2's Road Race: Kendi Thomas (of both Whitman and Hagens Berman) finished in the top ten, and all the girls fought tooth and nail for every last point out there. After the first day of Nationals, Whitman is leading by a pretty solid margin (156 points to second place MIT's 115). KEEP IT UP WHITMAN!!! Good luck in today's crits! 

Over in Italy: 

Sometimes when a guy like Mark Cavendish runs his mouth, you want to hate the guy. "Cocky asshole," I though when I first read his interview with cyclingnews. 

But then, after his  team goes and crushes it in the Giro's opening TTT, putting him in the pink jersey (which he's likely to keep for a few days at least), it's hard to hold those words against him. Cycling: the only sport where wearing bright pink makes you look less like a cocky asshole, and more like you know just what you're talking about. 

Up in Belgium 

Tom Boonen got caught sniffing coke again! I love it! To paraphrase Cooper, Tornado Tom just won the shit out of Paris-Roubaix for the third time -- of course he's going to do a little coke! Come on UCI/Quickstep/WADA -- sniffing coke isn't a doping violation out of competition, so why are you even testing for it? I don't agree with Boonen's decision to blow lines of coke off the top tube of his new Specialized, but I understand -- HE JUST WON THE SHIT OUT OF PARIS-ROUBAIX FOR A THIRD TIME!