44. INSERT CUP A INTO STEM B

Well it’s raining again. Mind you it’s been raining all week and then some in the big city (Sydney not Cessnock) so for a change they’re all up to their necks in water and I get to look confused when I hear about it instead of the other way around. So I can’t complain too much right?

Does mean I haven’t been able to get out for a ride as much as I would like to, and by that I mean absolutely bloody well need to, lest all the good work I've done turning my soft and spindly legs into storehouses of barely contained raw power just waiting to be unleashed in athletic endeavour, go to tragic waste. 

I suspect this enforced inactivity may have contributed to my criminal lack of motivation in the whole ride a bike, blog about riding a bike sphere. I realise I haven’t written anything on this blog since my rather random ranting of last week so shame on me for letting down my loyal readership........all 7 or 8 of you.

In an effort to kick my arse out of this shameful slackness I bit the bullet and actually put some stuff on the bike today.

To be more precise I used the thingy marked ‘A’ instead of the considerably more expensive thingy marked ‘B’....

 to put these thingy’s (which when put all together are known as a 'headset')..

...by means of the process pictured on the left in the picture below to end up with an installed headset as pictured on the right in the picture below...

All clear?

And besides one or two dodgy moments when I thought I had jammed the silly thing in sideways and would have to cut it all out with a hacksaw or something (remedied via the judicial application of the my state of the art wacking hammer), it all went very smoothly.

Brilliant.

43. IN DEFENCE OF OPTIMISM.

Be honest with yourself. Doesn't it make it just a little bit easier to sit around in comfort when you hold the opinion that nothing you do will make any difference anyway.

Is it a co-incidence that the societies that tend to think this way, which is to say any culture that has successfully invented the talk back radio show, are also the ones that have it pretty good right where they are?

It's no use coming up with alternate forms of energy - those other bastards won't do anything and we'll all get done over.

No point paying taxes - our dirtbag politicians will just waste it all anyway.

Screw doing anything about the ongoing obscenity that is large chunks of Africa - THEIR dirtbag politicians will just steal it all, turn it into bombs and send it back to us strapped to some boat person.

Do you reckon the farmer who gets up every day in some country where they wouldn't know what to do with a triple soy latte if one landed in their laps, to tend the 13 cows that are the life of not just him but his or her entire family, can afford to think like that?

For that matter, do you think those struggling up the Kokoda Track, or carving a living out of the Australian bush or insert whatever other noble endeavor you like at this point, had the luxury of thinking 'Ah f**k it all, what's the point it's all going to end up being wrecked by some other incompetent anyway'.

The hell they could.

We can of course. Because if we do nothing we still get to have our TV's and our cars and our lattes (yes I am aware that the use of the latte to illustrate 1st world hubris is a tired and much beaten about cliche) and our 2 thousand dollar mountain bikes. 

At least until the guy with 13 cows notices we have all this stuff and seem to be taking no action whatsoever to try and maybe cut him and his family in on the action and decides maybe he and his mates should do something about that....

Or...

Maybe we stop making the excuse that someone else is going to put all our good work to the sword and demand that they don't. Instead of asking our Politicians over and OVER what the price of a litre of milk is or whether they got pissed in university or whatever. Instead of demanding they adopt position B instead of position A over and OVER and then calling them back flippers entirely lacking a moral backbone when they do exactly that. Instead of that, maybe we could make the assumption that most of them didn't get into politics with the specific aim of screwing us all over and get them to accomplish a few things. 

Maybe we adopt the attitude of all those people from our past that we profess to worship and make the decision that a bit of sacrifice today is a small price to pay for the entirely self serving opportunity to look back in 30 years and say as a generation....

'We built that. Now say nice things about us on your radio show.'

42. GEEZ. WHERE DID THAT WEEK GO?

Oops.

Skip one blog and then another and all of a sudden it's next week. Crap.

Ok then. I'm probably going to back off on the 3 times a week posting for a little bit while I continue to churn through the award winning, intellectually invigorating and massively entertaining 100 Days of Drawing Challenge. 

Looking at the number of times each of my recent posts has been viewed, even if I get a 100% hit rate on self harming directly related to this news that shouldn't keep our health system jammed up for longer than a few minutes...even better if a couple of those people are in another country (though if you're in the States please make sure your insurance is all paid up).

......just to be sure - please don't self harm. It's not funny or clever.

Might take a break for this post from the whole cycling thing just to raise a couple of things I wish happened last week that didn't.

1. I wish Julia Gillard had smacked Howard Sattler in the face. For that matter, she could do a lot worse electorally speaking than book herself onto all of the programs that choose to operate with his particular style (I'm thinking Alan Jones, Andrew Bolt, possibly Ray Hadley if he still has a show...) and haul off on all of them. I'm sure she wouldn't have to wait long for what most courts in the land would consider just cause. Probably wouldn't even have to sit down in the case of Alan Jones before he'd something ludicrous.

2. I wish Joel Madden had fronted the media to bring to their attention the absurdity of running the news that he - the heavily tattooed rock star famous for being a....heavily tattooed rock star - had been caught with grass in his hotel room.

This reminds me of the time that snowboarder at the Olympics got  caught with marijuana in his urine. Ooh. A snowboarder. That smokes grass. Shocking.

I also wish I'd stubbed my toe on a huge gold nugget while feeding the chooks. But that's probably pushing it.

41. ATTACHING SOME BITS

Behold the attached whirly bits.

If you could use your mind to stick some pedals on the end of those cranks that would be good (I left them off on account of it being more convenient that way when I go to add all the other stuff I'm ordering next). Take my word for it - everything went into the holes they were supposed to and everything spins, or alternatively does not spin, as it is designed to.

So I'm pretty happy with myself. Of course I haven't actually done anything remotely bike like on it yet due to the fact that it, well, isn't remotely bike like, but I am confident.

and here's another view...

I decided to go for just the top part of the chain guide (which is almost certainly going to need some further adjustment once I get around to running a chain through it) on the grounds that 1. I am not a World Cup winning downhill race lunatic and 2. As previously mentioned - I can always attach it later on if I need to.

Next up is quite the shipment. Wheels, forks, headsets, stem and handlebars. Or if you want to be technical about it - the round rolly things and the steering whatsits. Preliminary YouTube research suggested I would need to invest in some fairly complicated and not exactly inexpensive tools to go along with those purchases in order to fit them in a manner considered safe and professional. Secondary YouTube research however suggests I can do the same job with some plastic pipe, threaded rod, two nuts and some blocks of wood.

So I'm going to go with the cheap option for starters, at least to the point where I'm absolutely certain carrying on in that manner will entirely fuck my nice new bicycle. It's all about the confidence right? As I'm sure I will find out when I finally get to the point where I have to cut a chunk of the steerer off my new $400 forks with a hacksaw (or possibly a pipe cutter). 

Measure 16 times. Cut once.

40. STUPID ELITE SPORT NANCY BOYS....

I was watching the Giro d’Italia (which as far as I can tell is Italian for Tour De France) on SBS the other day, mainly because it immediately precedes the excellent and very much underrated Ninja Warrior, and there was footage of one of the lead riders whose bike had had a ‘mechanical’ (which as far as I can tell is Normal Person for ‘busted’).

I was faintly amused I have to say, by the little tanty the guy threw on the side of the road in response to his bad luck – he got off his bike, stomped up and down a couple of times, chucked the bike into the bushes and then retrieved it all in very good time – but then I was amazed to see his support car come screaming to a halt behind him.

In response to furious beckoning, one of his crew ran up with A COMPLETELY NEW BIKE, then gave him a nice big push to get going again before cleaning up the riders now discarded bike, hopping back into the car and shooting off in pursuit of his man (presumably in case he needed to get a new pair of underpants 3kms up the road or something).

Now. I am aware of the arguments around this kind of thing at the top level of any sport. It’s all about allowing the athlete to do what he trains to do at the best level he can and the punters don’t pay to see Cadel Evans (it wasn’t Cadel, he’s just the only name I could come up with at 5 o’clock in the morning. Cadel would have fashioned a new tyre from surrounding vegetation, made the change and been back in the lead before this other guy had finished his first stomping dummy spit because he’s a TOP AUSSIE) or whoever sitting on the side of the road/track/oval twiddling his or her thumbs instead of being all elite and shit.

I reckon those arguments are bollocks.

I could go completely off on the whole interchange/replacement thing at this point (and don’t get me started on all the fluoro wearing bastards that get to run around all over the field during Rugby League and AFL games) but let’s just stick to cycling for the moment.

One of the great justifications for the absolutely INSANE levels of money pumped into the top levels of cycling as a sport (and you can probably apply at least some of this to motor sport as well) is that it allows the big companies to test out new products and pass on what they learn to us. Which is fine. What better way to sort out a bike that I can buy and ride securely for years than to submit it to the punishment of elite competition?

Except if you remove the need for a bike to be durable by allowing a rider to replace it, in its entirety, in the middle of a race, where is the value to me. Particularly as one of the reasons it broke down was almost certainly because it had been so absurdly engineered to be light as a feather with strength a secondary consideration.

And speaking as a punter. I LIKE the idea that a rider can have a breakdown, whip on a new tyre from the gear he is carrying himself and continue on valiantly. Given (in my world at least) all the other guys are in the same boat and just as likely to have the same problem at some point in the race, isn’t that just the kind of thing that makes for truly awesome spectacle.

Next: Friday? I don’t know. I am now making this up as I go.