Cruelty in Tilgate

We haven't been to Tilgate for a few weeks but some other idiots have...

It's that crazy American again

[What do you think makes Kent more angry? The events below, or the fact that we're so slack we don't get around to publishing his rant until a good 9 months later?]

So, the lady who answers the fucking telephone says they are open for downhill until October 9th. I don’t want to be there on the last weekend, figuring it will be a fucking beehive of dweebs trying get their money’s worth out of the creaking Iron Horse SGS’s and rusty Kona Stinkys they bought last Spring and left in the shed all Summer, so I leave on the morning of Monday the 3rd in rented Chrysler Town and Country Minivan with Stow and Go. (This means that the two back rows of seats disappear into the floor of the van at the tug of a nylon strap, which is infinitely better than having the two back rows of seats disappear into the living room of my house after a vicious, sweaty wrestling match between me and two 180 pound bench seats all soft and springy on one side and all insanely sharp and pointy metal parts on the other side, as the former takes about two minutes and has an injury risk of ze-fucking-ro, while the latter inevitably results in a trip to the emergency clinic for sutures and the postponement of all sports action due to inability to grip anything but my tiny hooter.)
            So, in proper livery, my ungrateful trail bitch, Josh (The chimp with the exposed patella in #5) roll the Town and Country like scalded dogs fifteen hours into Hillbillyland listening to a disturbing blend of Modest Mouse and Jimi Hendrix all the way. Stopping only for gas, Cheddar Cheese and Pretzel Combos and Maurice’s Bar-B-Q, we roll into Snowshoe armed with a Da Bomb Bikes Mindbomb (a Quebec, Canada company with a pretty good idea of what it takes to go down) and a fully tricked Cannondale Team Gemini DH (Saint/888/Halo/2.7 Maxxis Minions) (Which reminds me, if you are going down, you should be going down on Minions, and when they try to sell you a front for the front and a rear for the rear, tell them to sod off, Put a front on the front and a front on the rear. The Minion fronts are more clingy than an anorexic blond.)
            So, properly lubricated and trying to figure out what time we need to craw out of the hotel to achieve sports action, I asked the lady behind the front desk what time the lift on the freeride side of the mountain start running. She said: “This late in the season the lift on the freeride side is only running on weekends.” So I asked the lady what time the lift starts running on the downhill side of the mountain. She said: “This late in the season, the lift on the downhill side of the mountain is only running on the weekends.” So, I asked the lady what time the first shuttle leaves the parking lot for the top, and she said: “This late in the season the shuttle is only running on weekends.”
            Fucked-Fucked, I said: “I called you from fucking Florida two fucking days ago and you told me the fucking place was open for downhill until the 9th. She said: “We are open for downhill until the 9th.”  I said: “How the fuck can you be open for downhill when there are no lifts and no fucking shuttle?” She explained that we could ride our bikes six and a half miles up the paved road to the top.
            “What the fuck are you talking about?  I almost had a fucking myocardial infarction pedaling that barge 100 feet up the driveway from the parking lot to the hotel. If I wanted to fucking pedal I would have left home with a fucking cross-country bike with butterfly decals on it. I would be wearing fucking spandex, and I would have gone to one of the ten thousand other trails less than fifteen hours and $300 worth of gasoline from my house.”
            “FUCK THIS.” I said. “We are going to turn around and go back down to North Carolina and ride in the Pisgah National Forest. I know the boys who run the bike shop in Brevard, and they will shuttle us 45 minutes to the top of a sick 9 mile scarefest over, under, around and through rocks the size of Subarus.”
            Six hours later we were in Brevard being told that Rangers in the National Forest who were concerned that DH bikes were degrading the trail system had just instituted a new no shuttle rule in the National Forest: “IF YOU CAN’T RIDE IT UP, YOU CAN’T RIDE IT DOWN.”
            Six hours later I was dozing on the sofa in my living room. The bikes never even came out of the van. No sports action. Fucked-Fucked.

Kent will be running another riding trip in summer 2007. If it's anything like this one, it should be a blast. The main blast coming from his head exploding, that is.

T-shirts

More t-shirts are going to be ordered soon, but I thought you'd do well to hear what designs were available.
(A) The classic Respect The Cock in white on Northern Scum Green / Cushtie Safety Orange / Pillar Box Red.
(B) Supercock emblem in red & yellow on blue, to tie in with the new film
(C) STOPADOODLEDOO Athletic in boring white on boring black.
Votes below, please.
Oh, and does anyone know where Ratboy is? I've got his Oakleys

Are all Americans like this?

[Last year, Kent went to Snowshoe to do a bit of riding, and although he told us how he got on, it went in the mystical Issue 6, and so nobody ever saw it. Somehow I feel it deserves a bit more circulation, so here's his story:]

We never once saw that dwarf Bourdon the whole weekend. I'm betting he was holed-up in one of the high end slopeside condos with one or more of the three Vietnamese hookers that slithered out of a yellow HUMVEE about 1:30 am Friday. If I had the choice of riding with me or beaucoup dinky-dao with three Vietnamese contortionists with bee-sting tits, I know my bike would still be clean. We chased Carlin Dunne for a while instead. That fucker is fast. Not very goddamned funny. Not a fucking laugh a minute, but very fast. Really just a quiet blur somewhere down in the rocks. At least he wasn't smoking fucking cigarettes like everyone else on the shuttle bus.

This is Kent. Is he more or less scary to look at than the "General Lee" with his gun and his bust up shoulder?

The "freeride" side of the mountain was the usual amalgamation of nasty roots, holes and rocks, punctuated by narrow wood bridges and wooden berms fifteen feet high over nasty roots, holes and rocks, all of it wetter than a Sophomore pussy on Prom Night. They put up "Feature Ahead" warning signs just in front of any man-made obstacles, which, of course, is a fucking joke, as the natural terrain in the trail was way harder to ride than any of the "dangerous" man-made stuff.
The "downhill" side was surprisingly dry. The Pro DH course was mostly wide open and very fast, with lots of opportunities for large air. I don't know what the cross country course looked like, because I did not give give a shit, and was disinclined to follow the trail of brightly colored spandex in that direction.
Saturday morning we ran into Missy Giove, who is not really out of retirement, but who is going to ride the NORBA races this weekend anyway. She was practicing the Pro DH course, but we convinced her to come fart around with us on the freeride side, and wound up hanging around with her, dodging and bouncing off trees for the rest of the weekend. Missy got April Lawler to come ride with us, so we spent Saturday afternoon chasing girls through the woods. Missy brought two Intense bikes and a 222 with some very trick shit on it, but April's Intense has some kind of Fox air fork that looked like it came from NASA. Fuck, it was better than NASA. Must be nice.....

Bet Missy's jealous of this 222 though - forget the trick shit, how about a few Stopa stickers and 'forgetting' to wash the bloody thing for six months?

Sunday morning, heading for the cycle cross course, my trail bitch, Rob somehow managed to rip the rear derailleur off his Mind Bomb while going about 50mph down a gravel road. The derailleur went up into the spokes and locked up the wheel. The resulting skid was nearly 300 feet long. What did not get broken in the initial explosion of parts got broken by Rob jumping up and down on the carcass cursing like a demon. We spent the middle of the day in the shop, drinking Red Bull and trying to cobble the Mind Bomb back together with a improbable combination of SRAM and Shimano drivetrain parts.
The high point of the weekend was a tie between Missy showing us her "special" tattoo¹, and Rob crashing so hard on the Sport Course that he knocked one of his top front teeth out. How one loses a tooth inside a full face helmet is still a bit of a mystery to me, but Rob has the fucking thing in a ziploc bag in his camelback, if you want to see it. I wanted to get pictures of both of these events for you, but Missy was a bit sketchy about the legality of it all, and Rob refused to open his mouth for the rest of the day. (Jesus, what a blessing that turned out to be.)
We rode everything at least twice, and the Sport Course/Powerline combination turned out to be the gang favorite, although some of the berms on Powerline were a bit dilapidated, or seemed so to us, being spoiled brats who had ridden the course in pristine condition the day before it opened back at the end of May.
We pulled all of the stickers off the "da bomb" so everyone had to ask what it was. This became tedious very quickly. The 888 gave it a very sinister stance, and we mostly just cursed in French at anyone we did not already know. I, of course was riding the Bubble Gum Gemini, and was immediately recognized by staff and returning guests alike as the smart ass with the vulgar stickers (Thank you very much!) on his fag pink bike. When Carlin Dunne first saw me gearing up to ride, he stared at the incredible pinkness of the Gemini and said: "You must be pretty good if you ride that."

Enjoy that? More Kentish fun next week, including the immortal line 'I said: “I called you from fucking Florida two fucking days ago and you told me the fucking place was open for downhill until the 9th. She said: “We are open for downhill until the 9th.”  I said: “How the fuck can you be open for downhill when there are no lifts and no fucking shuttle?” She explained that we could ride our bikes six and a half miles up the paved road to the top.'

¹ Well, there are now two reasons that I know I'm better than the Missile herself. This is the second one.

Tis the season for crashing

Hot on the heels of Jason doing his collarbone a week or two after starting to ride again, and my top-tube-denting, testicle-grazing crash last night, the Vancouver contingent must have been feeling a bit jealous. Or rather, to celebrate Laura getting a new bike, she fell off it. All those of you who don't like blood, look away now...

All those of you that do like blood, what are you? Vampires? Goth rockers?

Ouch, ouch, and again ouch

Inspired by Jason's activity last week, I took the Klein out for a ride. Have to get fit for the Singlespeed World Drinking Championships in August, after all.
Everything was going far too well. Actually rode some singletrack in Kent that was more than five yards long, and didn't involve barbed wire / tiger shit / perpendicularly bisecting hawthorn bushes. And then all of a sudden, on a flat, straight section, the bike stopped, I went through the air and stopped myself by hitting a tree. Nothing broken, but scraped a load of skin off my arm and my leg hurts like hell. But worse than that, I've put a dent in the top tube of the Klein. I've never crashed hard enough to dent a bike before. Perhaps that's a sign that I'm getting faster? Some hope...

The wild, wild west [Croydon]

Here's a picture of the outlaw 'General Lee' Jason:
.

And here's the actions of a loyal follower (right click to download)

The BFG does a stunt

Ok, not quite up to Jason's spanging-himself-standard, but here's a little movie from the set of Peep Show, for all you Faceginamaniacs: (right click here to download)

Questions, questions

Or as Jason would say:



What's the time Mr. Wolf?
What's the time?
What's the time Mr. Wolf?
What's the time?
What's the time Mr. Wolf?
What's the time?
What's the time Mr. Wolf?
What's the time?

I say it's 1 o'clock
2 o'clock
3 o'clock
4 o'clock
5 o'clock
6 o'clock
It's spooling after dinner
7 o'clock
8 o'clock
9 o'clock when you're when you're with the boys
10 o'clock
11 o'clock

Mr Daddy long legs crawling up to the ceiling
The sun don't shine the sun don't shine the sun don't shine at all
Mamma Pappa say you should go to school, I don't know what for
Now that I've grown up and seen the world and all its lies


What's the time Mr. Wolf?
What's the time?
What's the time Mr. Wolf?
Oh oh-oh

Mr Daddy long legs crawling up to the ceiling
Has anyone seen the world and the state it's in it's never been this way before
Anyone who's got the eyes of love in another world
Is there anyone who's got the story anyone who's got that story

What's the time Mr. Wolf?
What's the time?
What's the time Mr. Wolf?
What's the time?
*Instrumental*

What's the time Mr. Wolf?
What's the time?
What's the time Mr. Wolf?
What's the time?
What's the time Mr. Wolf?
What's the time?
What's the time Mr. Wolf?
What's the time?

I say it's 1 o'clock
2 o'clock
3 o'clock
4 o'clock
5 o'clock
6 o'clock
It's spooling after dinner
7 o'clock
8 o'clock
9 o'clock when you're when you're with the boys
10 o'clock
11 o'clock

What's the time Mr. Wolf?
What's the time? ...
(Repeat to fade)