We've moved!!

In order to delay the inevitable freakout that's coming as I realize how close I am to actually going out and doing this, I've decided to move on over to www.crazyguyonabike.com

I think the layout over there is going to be more conducive to making this trip easy to follow and interesting. It might be a quick move though, I'm not sure what their policy is on swearing. Fingers crossed!

http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/?o=3Tzut&doc_id=5644&v=8

Note: Don't panic that the Firstgiving thingy is gone! There's a new fancy way to donate to the Humane Society directly on the new page. Oh happy day!

Seriously. the homeless have it figured out.

So planning is going well for the tour itself. I ended up making some fairly drastic changes to my equipment kit, which I'll discuss in some later post, but overall I feel VERY prepared for everything from August 20th onwards. That'll change and I'll be posting here sometime in early August with a post somewhere along these lines

GOD HELP ME WHAT HAVE I DONE HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP I'M SO FUCKING SCREWED ABORT ABORT

But for now, yeah, pretty laid back about that. The problem is what do for the month beforehand. Due to some fairly abrupt changes in my roomate's plans for this house, I found myself being told in early May that I had until July 25th to get my sweet, muscular caboose out of here. My original plan had been to just stay here, store my stuff at my friend Brett's place a few days beforehand, and just go straight from here to the road. I'd figure out where to live when I got back, paying for 2 months rent while I'm out in East Humpty, Missouri getting into knife fights with hobos for dibs on the best box car seemed like something I'd like to avoid.

So leaving here early doesn't change what I'll do when I get back, but since I don't plan on renting a new place until I get back, it does raise the interesting question of "where the hell am I supposed to live for the 25th through the 20th?" As time got closer and closer I was starting to worry abou this a LITTLE bit, until today I realized I had less than 2 weeks left here.

So I made a few phone calls and got a bit of the time taken care of. From August 18th-20th, I'm going to stay at studly Brett Murphy's pad, and try not to get in the way of whatever it is that weirdo does in his free time. From August 15th until the 18th, I'm going to either crash at my friend Kyle's place, or with my friend Steph Castro. This method of crashing with a different friend for a few days each time seemed to be working well, until I pretty quickly realized I'm an obnoxious, juvenile dickhead and have no friends to speak of. What was I gonna do for the bulk of my homeless time?

Enter the Roadrunner Hostel, Tucson's world-famous "only hostel".

http://www.roadrunnerhostelinn.com/content/view/21/46/

It actually looks like a pretty sweet deal. The rate is actually CHEAPER than my monthly rent here, and it at least doesn't strike me as a complete fleabag place.

Now, considering I'm planning on living out of several elaborate garbage bags for over 2 months, living out of a suitcase in a not-horrific hostel or crashing on friend's floors should hardly be the worst thing in the world. Also, from what I understand (and everything I understand comes from movies) hostels are full of interesting, diverse people, nearly all of whom are half-naked European models who walk around topless, sleep with anything, and can really plug you into the local social scene. Now I stopped watching that particular movie about 30 minutes in, but if I had to guess I'd assume it ended on a similar note, perhaps with all the roomates getting together and organizing a bake sale to buy a plasma screen TV for the local old folk's home.

This leaves on the 25th thru the 1st to deal with. Honestly the new people aren't moving into here until the 1st anyway, and that's assuming anyone rent the house starting then, so I can probably just get my stuff out of here but retain a sleeping bag and suitcase and crash here.

So yeah, it turned out a bit more complicated than I anticipated, but it seems to have turned out okay. In particular living in a nice-seeming hostel for 2 weeks might be particularly enjoyable. I'm not 100% how much my currently car-free lifestyle is going to bend me over for all of this, but it wouldn't be the end of the world if I had to rent a car a few days here and there.

Winning hearts and minds

It's been *gritting teeth* helpfully pointed out that for a blog about an alleged cross-country bike trip, there's been precious little talk about biking, and even less talk about biking from San Diego to Boston, and a surprising amount of movie reviews and juvenile swearing.

Fair enough. There's only so much I can babble about bikes and keep it interesting, y'know. Unless you folks want deep, thoughtful discussions about 14mm headset spacers being awesome, or how the SRAM Powerlink is the single greatest advancement in bicycle chain maintenance since the threaded pin extruder. In which case I'm more than happy to oblige.

So back to this post's title. I'm coming back from work, just about home, and feeling pretty down. Bookman's failed to have a book I wanted at two different locations, my MP3 player was 7 minutes into Dvorak's Carnival overture because I haven't figured out how to arrange my MP3s to keep boring instrumental music off my biking playlist, and Debrah Messing had grown a day older and uglier without appearing in my room wearing a French maid outfit and a grim determination to give her stupid French husband a reason to divorce her.

I was cruising down the bike lane at an intersection. This is always tricky because someone in the right lane might want to make a right hand turn at said intersection, and considers it their civic duty to cut off/cripple any and all bikers to their right when making any lane changes. I imagine they do this while gripping the wheel in white-knuckled fury, screaming "NOT TODAY, PEDESTRIAN!!!!".

So I sneak a glance behind me, and sure enough, some guy is indicating he's going to make a right hand turn. I jam on my brakes, come to a stop just in time to avoid crashing into his passenger side quarter panel, and rip off my headphones. I usually just try to give people who cut me off the staredown of a lifetime, because I'm a coward, but this guy was getting out of his car and I guess I panicked a bit..

Being irritated beyond belief, tired, and apparently suicidal, I screamed "WATCH THE FUCKING BIKE LANE, COCKFACE" and hammered my fist down on top of his trunk. I felt it dent pretty good. I then immediately took off on my way straight down the road. I didn't stop for conversation, or to see if I'd left a permanent dent, I felt I'd made my general feelings clear on the situation. I'm absolutely sure I effed up his trunk pretty good. I have no idea what year, make, or model the dude's car was, but it was something that was made within the past few years.

Now, I'm not a bicycle activist. I genuinely believe bikes shouldn't be considered this idealized pedestrian/vehicle hybrid that can go wherever it wants, and cars should just have to deal with them. In a fair world, they should be, but as I learned in my sophomore year of college when I admitted to having a crush on KD Lang in the early 90's, life is often cruel and unfair. The fact is 80% of all people are retarded and in their own blissful cloud of daydreaming when they're moving around. This includes bikes and cars. If a car and bike get into an accident, the bicyclist loses 99.999999% of the time. Bikes don't belong on the road together for the same reason chicks don't play in the NFL.

However after being car-free since October '08, I'm starting to understand why a lot of bicyclists are complete douchebags to cars. We're woefully outmatched and the people in their goddamn cars know it. If I had a wooden nickel for every time I've been run over, had stuff thrown at me, screamed at in an attempt to startle me and make me fall off, etc... well, unless I was at Yoken's* in Portsmouth, NH, I'd just have a lot of useless wooden nickels I guess, but the point is I'd have a lot. And it gets really aggravating. At this point I'm not sure if some kind of summit meeting is needed or what, but it's outright war between cyclists and motorists at this point and seeing as how I made the stupid, stupid decision to be a cyclist, I'm starting to feel like I chose to be a power forward for the Washington Generals.

Geez I just realized I hope that guy doesn't end up behind me any time soon.





* Holy crap, they closed down Yokens?!! CURSE YOU, PROGRESS!!!

Kyle reviews pointless shit nobody cares about (for a change)

#1. My '09 Trek 7.3FX (B-)

Ah, the old Trek. I've taken to calling it my "beater", but honestly it was an expensive-ass bike when I bought it and it's still in pretty good shape. I put over 3000 miles on it in just over 5 months, so it got worked a little harder than the good folks are Trek probably intended it to. Anyways, here's my thoughts:

Components:

The Front derailleur is complete crap. It's a C102, whatever the fuck that is. I was forced to learn the Shimano hierarchy a long time ago, and this thing doesn't even show up on it. That either means it's a one-off model for this bike, or it's the REALLY cheap kind they put on Wal-Mart and Target bikes. I tend to think the former, just due to this bike's price, but even then it was still garbage. I could just never get it to behave. Front derailleurs with a triple chainring are hard enough to get adjusted properly, but no matter what I do this one still rubs in chain combinations it shouldn't. I don't cross-chain, I'm talking rubbing in the third chainring and the smallest cog in the rear cassette (i.e. the highest gear possible).

The rear derailleur on the other hand, was pretty solid. It's a Deore, which is pretty much the entry level component group for Shimano mountain bikes (there's Altus as well, but for "real" bikes pretty much everything starts at Deore). It needed tightening up fairly regularly but shifted well enough, and I did beat on it a bit when I was starting out and it never jumped the chain or complained.

The brakes were crap as well. They were V-Brakes, which I'm not terribly familiar with, but the rear one especially was always horribly out of alignment. You all know what I'm talking about. You pull the brake lever, and one side yanks 4 inches to the rim, and the other one barely moves. That's a brake out of alignment. Ugh.

The tires are another thing I was not terribly impressed with. They're Bontrager Hardcases, they're supposed to be DESIGNED for city riding, and I was still constantly popping tubes on glass and wires in the road. The rear tire even ended up getting slashed, forcing me to purchase a new one. The wheels are fine for most applications, but if you're a big guy and will be carrying 30-50 pounds of stuff, I don't think the 32 spoke rims are going to hold up well.

The frame I will say nothing but good stuff about. It was light as hell, responsive, and looked really sharp to boot. The frame was definitely the best thing about this bike.

Durability:

I'm not sure if maybe I got a dud or what, but this bike didn't hold up REAL well. The rear tire died, so I had to replace that. The headset is making a creaking noise when I put weight on it, I'm not sure what's causing that. A spoke on the rear wheel spontaneously broke. The chain is either warped or stretched because you can see it changing angles as you're riding.

3,000 miles isn't a TON of mileage for a brand new bike, and I was getting it tuned up and checked over fairly regularly. Enough stuff went wrong with it that I'm pretty skeptical it'll still be alive a year from now.

Suitability for Touring:

This bike would've worked fine for touring. I really believe that. It has braze ons (holes) for everything: fenders, racks, water bottles, you name it. The geometry was nice and relaxed, the chainstays were plenty long, and it felt stable when weighted down.

For those of you reading this who're looking to do your own tour someday and you're on a budget, and you've only got around 700-800 bucks to spend, first look at the Windsor Tourist. But if that's sold out (which it always is) then check out this bike. The fact that there'll likely be a local Trek dealer for it is a plus.

#2. Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen (B+)

Let's get one thing straight, I watched the original movie 7 times. IN THE THEATRES. I fucking loved that movie. In terms of pure action movies, it goes

#1. Terminator 2
#2. Transformers (First one)
#3. The Rock.

Since I would gladly punch Michael Bay in the neck if I thought I could get away with it, I'm not sure why I like those two movies so much, but there it is.

I went to the midnight showing of this movie and it was freaking awesome. Now let me clarify that a bit: There isn't a single aspect of this movie that is well done that doesn't directly have to do with giant robots killing each other. The acting, the plotting, the "humor" (Hey let's have the Mom curse and eat pot brownies! We're so edgy and fresh!!) and all that other crap was uniformly horrible. But holy crap were the action parts good.

Getting back to that Michael Bay comment, he's a horrible person and should probably be melted down into a sticky goo to be used as a low grade asphalt sealant. Seriously, as a person, any time you watch an interview with him blood will start shooting out of your ears. And as a director, he can make stuff blow up really well, but he's completely incapable of doing anything else. What saves him in the Transformers movies is the steady hand of Stephen Spielberg.

Now, again, by himself, Steve-O is a fucking mess. He used to make cool, edgy movies. He kind of jumped the shark with Saving Private Ryan, and then he made War of the Worlds (good movie completely destroyed by the ending, and that had Spielberg's sweaty fingerprints all over it), started digitally editing out rifles and turning them into walkie-talkies, and finally made the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

(There's two schools of thought on that movie. Some people feel it was an entirely acceptable, possibly even engaging summer popcorn flick. Others, like me who had The Last Crusade on VHS and watched it no less than 4,349 times as a little kid, have a less charitable view. Specifically, me and the writers of South Park feel Spielberg systematically raped Indy over and over again, in front of very eyes, then leaving his useless, steaming corpse in front of us before peeing on it and walking away)

But combine Bay's over-the-top "everything must explode, all other concerns are secondary" approach to filmmaking, and Spielberg's "what if you replaced that mean looking shrub with a magical Happy Tree that grants wishes and gives hugs" modus operandi, and you get a pretty good flick.

Now having said that, I think maybe Spielberg lost a bit of control over Bay in this movie, because a lot of non-action bits have degraded into sheer lunacy, and boring lunacy at that. I tend to imagine Spielberg's reduced role happened suddenly, and nothing was ever the same afterwards. A conversation like this probably happened.

Spielberg: Mike, I've been reading the script, and, uh, I've got some concerns. Do you really think we should make two of the comic relief robots into the most offensive ethnic stereotype ever made in the history of film?
Bay: It's what the fans want Steven. We got away with Jazz in the first movie, didn't we?
Spielberg: Yeah but, I dunno, one of the ones in this movie even has a gold tooth....
Bay: Fuck you, Steve. Transformers made over 780 million dollars, I am Michael Bay and I am a genius. You're not going to deprive the fans of my awesome ideas.
Spielberg: Okay, but....
Bay: No, I said fuck you. Now the two robots that've got your panties twisted are twins.
Spielberg: Twins? Wait, what, like they got made at the same time?
Bay: NO they're twins. And now there's a girl robot.
Spielberg: How can there be a girl -
Bay: FUCK YOU NOW ONE OF THEM HAS AN AUSTRALIAN ACCENT. I can do this all day.
Spielberg: But that doesn't make any-
Bay: NOW SHIA LEBOUF IS GOING TO DIE AND HAVE A VISION OF ROBOT HEAVEN!!
Spielberg: Now wait just a sec-
Bay: I AM MICHAEL BAY, I MADE BAD BOYS II!!!! I SHALL NOT TOLERATE YOUR INSOLENCE!!!!

Still, though, yeah, B+. Dude they shot Devastator with a rail gun.