lonefrontranger

this is oddly cathartic

2006-10-26T21:25:00.000-06:00

so here I am in the midst of finishing a gargantuan pumpkin cheesecake.

it's about twenty minutes from coming out of the oven and right now the entire apartment is bathed in the heady aroma of pumpkin pie spice and several pounds of Philly's finest.

dibs on a slice anyone?

it's the biggest cheesecake recipe I've ever seen or made... well considering I've never made cheesecake before, but anyhows. I think this thing is gonna feed not only my colleagues but prolly most of the internet with some left over.

anyways earlier on I was following the roommate's recipe for a cookie crumb crust. like all his recipes, it was pretty basic: "mash 1 box cookies, mix with 1 stick melted butter, refrigerate".

he's a really, really good cook that lad, however his recipes tend towards the spartan on the details.

sooo... there I was wandering around the living room with a box of lorna doones and a 4 quart steel mixer bowl, wondering how in the fuck I was going to mash up an entire box of cookies - seeing as we're somewhat light on kitchen gear, y'know -- luxuries like rolling pins and such. not to mention the last time I tried something like this with a food processor it promptly went tits up.

Now, might I add that we do have eight bikes and seventeen pairs of wheels and about five thousand eight hundred seventy-two bicycle-related doo-dads and whatchamajiggers including a huge rollaway tool chest full of every bike part and maintenance option known to god (you know, those kind car mechanics have? we got one, only it's full of bike tools).

then inspiration struck as my eye lit upon ye olde 12 oz. claw hammer.

turns out a 12 oz. claw hammer is the dog's nutz for mashing cookies, especially in one of those cheapassed Target 4 quart steel mixer bowls cos the profile of the claw and the bottom of the bowl marry up like peas n carrots. So I wrapped that hammer up in a floursack rag, stuck an old Stabbing Westward cd in the stereo and got jiggy with it.

this freaked out the cat and I'm sure the downstairs neighbours wondered what the aitch I was up to, but as the Geto Boyz spit in the movie Office Space: god DAMN it feels good to be a gangsta.

I feel so much better now. thanks y'all for listening.

cheers,

LFR

o Denver Cruise, how I shall miss thee...

2006-10-03T20:21:00.000-06:00

Last Wednesday evening included many beers, my date crashing his fixte, some drunken streaking chicks and lots of wrong turns.

ahhhh, Denver Cruise, how I will miss thee in the cold winter months... yet therein lies a tale:

A long, long time ago, in a city far, far away, high up in the Rockies where the air is thin and the microbrews are phat -- there were a bunch of cruisers. Most were former (or current) couriers, and every Wednesday night throughout the soft summer months, they would meet at the wineshop with their friends, dress in humourously themed costumes and ride their cruiser, track and singlespeed bicycles around from bar to bar to bar until either the bars closed or they were too drunk to balance... or both.

One of the cruisers, an enterprising young Irish lad, decided that the key to ultimate cruising bliss was to build himself a 'Drunken Cruiser', to merge the themes of boozing and cruising in a metaphorical endless, infinite feedback loop; a proverbial Moebius of debauchery. Being that he was himself a metalworker, and owned a property full of lathes and welding equipment, he cracked a 40 and got down to work.

Thus the Ketel One Valdez was born. Conceived in inebriation, born in intoxication, nurtured in pure unabashed blitzedness and intended never to be ridden sober, it became the paradigm of debauched pubcrawlery. Weighing in at a svelte 83 lbs, stretching 9 feet long, and carrying a fifth of Russia's finest in the conveniently located faux fuel tank, this behemoth inspired fear in the hearts of fixed gear riders up and down the Front Range.

Imagine the pure visceral terror felt by the rider of a scant sixteen pounds of gazelle-like grace and noble purpose that is a fixed gear bicycle, as this juggernaut hurtled out of control on an irrevocable intercept vector, the high child-like scream of its thoroughly inadequate braking system sounding as the klaxons of doom.

on Wednesday night, the KOV claimed its fifth victim.*

*no fixed gears were harmed in the making of this tale

cheers,

LFR

the gates of autumn

2006-09-29T21:37:00.000-06:00

Shut your eyes and think of somewhere
Somewhere cold and caked in snow
By the fire we break the quiet
Learn to wear each other well

And when the worrying starts to hurt
and the world feels like graves of dirt
Just close your eyes until
you can imagine this place, you're our secret space at will

Shut your eyes, I spin the big chair
And you'll feel dizzy, light, and free
And falling gently on the cushion
You can come and sing to me

And when the worrying starts to hurt
and the world feels like graves of dirt
Just close your eyes until
you can imagine this place, you're our secret space at will

-- Snow Patrol

I was certain I'd gotten over the appalling habit of listening to the same damn song over and over when I was about seventeen, but apparently not. I'm now at 3 Snow Patrol albums and counting. Yes, yes, I know their latest album is distressingly 'pop' to their indie core fanbois, however I do feel both their earlier stuff and the most recent album show amazingly insightful lyricism, plus a studied and intelligent evolution.

Kids, I know how painfully devoted you are to that 500-watt college station you've been listening to for the entire duration of your 7-year attempt to graduate, and that it feels like a betrayal when your precious little twee bands hit adolescence and start making eyes at the A&R men, but let me enlighten you. Starving in a garret and playing shitty 50 seat venues is all a noble cause and such, but it doesn't pay the bills, and indie bands (to paraphrase Woody Allen) are like sharks. If they don't continually swim forward and thus evolve, they die. Not to mention that it's one thing to sound like a garage band when you are a garage band, but it's both sloppy and ill-advised once you're getting paid decent money to produce something that people who don't live in their moms' basements will want to buy.

When a band has been fortunate enough to get signed by a major label, I (personally) consider it refreshing that they put down the PBR, find some clean(er) tshirts to wear onstage, and make a good-faith effort to tune their instruments. Even better if they stretch their creative muscle and try out all those shiny new gadgets they've been given access to. It is absolutely possible to do all this without selling out. Irish-artists-who-shall-remain-nameless have indeed sold out, and this I will not argue. These guys, however, have yet to... despite opening for one of the more egregious examples of sellout in recent modern rock history. Oh and I don't doubt that with the exposure on some stupid TV show, the track Chasing Cars is poised to become the most-overplayed-song-on-the-radio for fall 2006, but if you listen closely to all the work on this album, you'll find it's well-crafted music that's still as emotionally raw and vulnerable as the stuff they were producing on Jeepster. (which happens to be the same label that spawned indie-pop gods Belle & Sebastian, who collaborated with the original SP members on their debut EP Starfighter Pilot).

man I loves me some Scots-Irish indiepop.

anyways,

The days are getting shorter, the nights colder, and ski season is just around the corner. This summer has disappeared like a prom dress at the afterparty. The roommate is getting antsy to start the ski season and cyclocross bikes have been getting a heavy workout for the past month. The road bikes are getting left on the hooks more and more often as chill mornings, changing leaves and chinook winds all conspire to make riding in the woods an attractive prospect.

nighty night,

LFR

mountain biker

2006-08-08T07:08:00.000-06:00

Okay, okay, enough with the cute already. What would this blog be without one of my seriously overcooked Photoshop messes as a header?

I particularly liked this shot cos it makes Aaron look like The Mountain Biker That Ate Seattle... or something like that. that's an extra-large Heckler and his saddle nose almost comes up to my collarbones, but somehow when he's on that bike, it looks tiny.

The two of us went and rode the West Magnolia trails last weekend.

This is a shot of the Heckler all by its lonesome, waiting for us to figure out the best route, since it's a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

A big wind storm a few years back blew down a bunch of trees, which made for an interesting texture in the background, and a 'signature' West Mag kind of shot.

"uh, which way now?" "dude, I don't remember..." "didn't you say you rode up here?" "that was four years ago! and I got lost! besides, everything's changed..." "so do you remember if the outer loop goes up or down this hill?" "dude, YOU'RE the one who read the map, you tell me!"

um, yea. looks like it was down the hill. Holy shredalicious line, Batman! This guy never ceases to astonish me with the sick terrain he can ride. and yes, it's every bit as steep as it looks. worse, actually.

we rode for about three hours straight, and it was darned hot. At some point I got distracted enough that he managed to confiscate the camera... and yes, Aaron really is that tall. well, that plus I'm a midget.

sometimes I manage to make it look like I can ride. sometimes.

Aaron retaliates for the many, many butt-shots I've taken of him, yikes!

This one says it all.

next up... more Breckenridge pics!! woo!

The cat's pyjamas

2006-08-07T20:20:00.000-06:00

I'm posting this because, well, come ON, it's too freaking cute not to! Billy (the kitty in the pj's) has been scratching at a spot on his ribs. So Aaron decided to get him a little baby jumper to keep him from worrying at it.

I wanted him to get Billy a 'Hello Kitty' jumper, but on review the little wrenches and stuff are too funny (well at least when you consider that Aaron's a pro bicycle mechanic).

I have been resisting this temptation for over a week, but Saturday night I couldn't stand it anymore. I had to get out the Nikon and shoot some guerilla adorableness-poisoning-inducing pics of the two of them passed out on the livingroom floor.

Saturday Aaron threw down at Winter Park again. He's confirmed in second place for the series; first place is the ::cough cough:: ~~sandbagger~~ dude who's won every race by like eight or ten minutes.

Saturday night we ate an entire monster pizza from Abo's (mmm, Abo's!!) whilst watching Hero and Garden State. About halfway through Garden State, Aaron decided to play with Billy on the living room floor. I told him 'dude, you know you're just going to pass out down here, and then I'll have to wake you up so you can go to bed...'

'oh no I won't, I love this movie...' (btw Garden State? Best. Movie. Soundtrack. EVER!)

ten minutes later, he's passed out, just like I said, probably during the pool scene, which IMO is one of the pivotal points in the movie. He and Billy were all curled up on his ma's afghan, and the result was just too freaking cute to pass up, as you can see.

so... here's the part where I figure out if A reads my blog, har har har. He would/will absolutely KICK MY BUTT if/when he finds out I've posted these.

I like to live dangerously.

Sweet dreams,

LFR

A busy summer

2006-07-29T22:36:00.000-06:00

This lead shot is probably my fave from the Denver Cruise series. It's nominally a capture of a rad moto cruiser, worked with my special secret lomo recipe... but that also happens to be my good fixte pal Frye there in the background, looking like an Abercrombie model.

Oh yes. Here we go again with my lame protestations of being busy. Honestly, though, the combination of my somewhat flakey bootlegnet wireless here at Chez LFR plus the dude considering it his Moral Imperative to keep me busy 24/7, has been seriously cutting into my internet time. On review, living alone pretty much sucked rocks compared to living with A and the Psychokitties (and the nine bikes... can't forget those guys either).

Perhaps if I post a bunch of photos that explain where I've been all summer, it will somewhat make up for the fact that I basically haven't had time to post.

This one's a shot of the Ogden Theatre marquee, with some awesome headliners up. I posted a ton more from this Denver Cruise on Roadbikereview awhile back, click to link.

Every other Saturday, I've been heading up to support Aaron and shoot pics at the Winter Park mountain bike series, which he's currently kicking major arse in.

That's a nice schwag shot from WP; Aaron picked this up on a cold rainy day a few weeks ago. His mom loved it.

This kid was just flat hauling in the slick, muddy conditions that day. Shooting fast motion in abysmal light, at roughly f/4 or so to maximise my shutter, whilst trying to keep the fill flash from startling the riders in the singletrack was a challenge. I had fun. I've also had quite a bit of interest in the shots I took, so I'm printing cut sheets and will take them to the next race, since there have been no photos posted on their web site for the series as yet.

Back in the '90s before he moved here from D.C., Aaron was both a sponsored rider and a professional mechanic for the Spooky factory team. Meaning he keeps his equipment (and mine) in peak working condition. The rain at this race was wreaking havoc with everyone's gear, so we heard plenty of squealing discs, creaking shocks and grinding drivetrains. The joke of the day was that Aaron keeps the Heckler so tight that it's just too damned quiet. We (meaning the marshals and me) couldn't even hear him coming, so all we got to see of "Rider #684!" was his Camelbak disappearing down the mountain. By the time I realised it was him, I'd completely missed the shot.

This one of him at the start, tho, really tells it like it is. Cold, damp and stressed out. Aaron's the rider on the far left, in the red-and-black kit.

Two weeks later, the sun was out, the course was much more open and rolling, and I had no such troubles capturing a good action shot of A in the singletrack this time. This one also shows I've figured out how to metre the fill correctly AND learned to use trap focus. O yeah!

Aaron has been hounding me to carry his big-ass fancy ballmount tripod to events. Meh. I'd rather shoot handheld and have the flexibility. I'm getting reasonably good at it. I also suspect that hucking a tripod along with all the other shite I carry at these races would be an exercise in How To Completely Own Myself. The singletrack I'm riding to get to these spots gets downright rocky, skinny and steep. It's already hard enough to sherpa 20 lbs of camera gear, bug spray, etc... up there in the Metropolis without the bonus option of clotheslining myself with a tripod.

When he hasn't been racing the Winter Park series, Aaron has been hauling me out to BFE Colorado to bag the biggest, sickest, most radical stashes of singletrack I've ever seen. Today we were out in the hinterlands somewhere north of Breckenridge for the second time in the past couple weeks. At the end of August, we're going to take a long weekend and head back out to Crested Butte for a four or five day epic.

This shot was from today, on the jeep road leading up to the Colorado trail. Oh. My. God!! This SOB totally redefines steep, ass-busting technical un-fun climbs. When I say the singletrack payoff is worth the pain in the rear (and the back, and the legs) getting up here, I mean it. The next 2 shots should somewhat prove it.

All this mountain biking (well A also drags me around on multihour road rides during the week...) is either going to kill me or make me fitter than I've ever been in my life. What I do know is that insane amounts of riding plus my refusal to drive to work for the past six months, or anywhere else for that matter, means I'm slimmer than I've been since high school.

Since it's been requested, I'm sticking a (somewhat) recent photo of me on the blog. Meh. Frye shot this one back in June at the Denver Cruise. I'm still toughing it out with the hair, tho at least now it's finally long enough to get put in a ponytail on rides.

Cheers,

LFR

this is plain getting creepy.

2006-07-25T01:01:00.000-06:00

I got carded tonight... again. Now, I'm not actually boasting. Nor am I honestly complaining because I really should be flattered considering I'm staring my 38th birthday in the face.

The creepy part comes in considering that tonight was the SECOND time in a week that I've been in a liquor store and got carded, and my companion (we were simply buying beer, nothing major) did not. Now, Aaron isn't massively younger than me, but he does happen to be on the opposite end of his thirties, and looks 25 if that.

last week tho... that was pretty freaking scary. you see, I was hanging out with my fixte bro Frye, and Frye, awesome brilliant dude tho he is, just happens to have turned 21 in May... and looks all of about sixteen. I actually gave the register clerk shit about that one, because how can you let that slide?. I'm like 'ok, I understand you're just doing your job and all, but seriously. You're going to card me, and I'm almost 40. But you don't even bat an eye at HIM??!!??'

I'm flattered, really. Now cut the crap and quit just blindly asking the girl in the group, just because you ASSume she's the younger.

I chalk that one up to pure chauvinism. Plain and simple. And if me calling 'bullshit' makes the clerk stop and think a minute then perhaps that's a good thing (although I really do not want to even get into the politics of 'underage' drinking here).

Kids these days. Hell maybe someday I'll grow some grey hair or something, and then I can forget about having to carry ID everywhere. I still can't get into a bar in LoDo without it, although I am fairly certain that's simply standard policy for them to card everyone who walks in the door regardless. Honestly, you can say it's flattering and all and I should appreciate it (well and of course I do!). But how do you think this makes my friends feel, considering I'm at least five years older than any of them? That's a bit of an insult, and it makes me uncomfortable.

Anyway, I'm just rambling. Thought it would be entertaining. And no, I don't keep a portrait in the attic.

Nighty night all.

Societal Snark Du Jour

2006-07-21T21:45:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I got a call from a good friend I hadn't heard from in awhile, so we decided to grab a bite at a nice local bistro. A glass of wine, some tapas and catching up on each other's exploits. Sounds like a recipe for a great casual Thursday evening, right?

well we hadn't counted on the asshat yupsters and their misbegotten hellspawn at the next table... oh, yes, I know you can guess what's coming next.

Cue one pair of screaming, running, whining, pouting toddlers. Climbing on furniture. Crawling on floors. Generally endangering themselves and the servers and patrons of this establishment.

It all came to a head with one of these adorable slimy little muppets Climbing. On. Our. Table!!! I mean WTF????!!!

it was at this point that I snapped. I was pissed. I went over to the mother, and gave her the ultra-polite, ultra-quiet, ultra-cold talking-to; to wit:

'I do not appreciate your rudeness in allowing your child to continue disrupting our meal. Nor do I intend to be responsible when he slips and cracks his head open on the table. So either you Get. Him. Under. Control. Now. or else I will complain to the management and I will Discipline. Your. Child. Personally.'

I have no idea how I managed to avoid getting beaten up, sued, arrested and/or screamed at for threatening their Precious Biddums. Dad made some ineffectual apologetic sorts of bullshit noise and they proceeded to round up the kids, paid and left in about two minutes flat.

I feel no sense of superiority here. Why the hell couldn't they just keep the kids seated and finish their meal; that's all I cared about.

Why in the Nine Million Names of God did this scene degenerate to the point that I felt compelled to go all UltraForce Hell Bitch on these clueless morons? I hate confrontation, and this kind of stuff makes me physically ill.

Suffice to say the yuppies and their festering brood got bitchslapped and went hungry, and our meal and our mellow Thursday night mojo was comprehensively ruined. Everybody in this scenario loses. Blah.

And why? whywhyWHY for the love of jesus merry jumping christ on a pogostick is this sort of behaviour tolerated, glossed over and generally allowed to carry on in public? Why?

Gentle Reader, kindly note. This was a Nice Restaurant. A $20-a-plate sit-down place in the middle of downtown Boulder, which at last check was considered fairly genteel and not quite the howling bourgeoisie wilderness some might attempt to paint it.

Nor do I believe (contrary to all evidence) that these people were raised by orangutans.

Oook.

positively Gothic

2006-07-05T19:16:00.000-06:00

So... it's been a long, long time since I've updated my blog. I really don't have a great excuse for this, except to say that I've been in the First Circle of Blogger Hell, as interpreted by the genius of Pouringdown (cheers Daniel, hope you enjoy the climbing in Estes dude!).

I guess the only thing I can say in my defence is that I moved (yet again) and have been super, super busy and motivated to ride, so the blog kind of went by the wayside. The only negative to the new digs is that Aaron and I are both too stubborn to pay for internet with open wireless links all around, so the wireless is kind of flaky on the Macbook until and unless I decide to deal with getting a more powerful wireless pickup. I can connect to the 'net maybe 30% of the time, and the connexion isn't reliable, so these days I basically just go ride my bike or enjoy tag-team cooking with my boy who just happens to be one of the better chefs in Colorado. seriously, he rocks on everything from top tier cordon bleu to wrangling the camp stove. All I have to do is sit back, watch, maybe peel potatoes and huck cleanup.

Speaking of Aaron, here's the master of disaster himself, riding a gnarly line on the Upper Trail at Crested Butte. We decided to ditch Boulder for 3 days of solitude, camping and sick mountain bike action. Remember that old Schwinn I built into a singlespeed? Well it is single no more; Aaron worked some of his mechanical magic on it and has transformed it into a sweet 8-speed hardtail. And get this: the entire cost of the bike is STILL less than $200. Check it out:

There are so many more pics from Crested Butte, but unfortunately there's only so much time in one day and battery life in the MacBook. In the neverending search for fast, free wireless, I'm blogging tonight front and centre from the ArtMart hotspot on Pearl and 12th in downtown Boulder.

cheers all,

LFR

a new leaf

2006-05-07T15:10:00.000-06:00

Spring has finally completely sprung, yay!

thanks to the folks who emailed / called / commented on the last post, I appreciate that. I don't usually go all off on the intellectual rants like that because a) most of the time I don't really know what I'm talking about which just makes me look even more like an asshat than usual and b) stuff like that bores the hell outa even me. christ that was a pompous post. but thank you. seriously, kick me if I do that again.

Before I get too far gone with the pics, I'd like to give a quick shout to Daniel at pouringdown. if you don't have a machine capable of running quicktime, oh geez do I feel sorry for you... and what the hell are you doing in the twentyfirst century anyways? throw that 486 out the nearest window and run, don't walk, to your nearest Best Buy or CompUSA or wherever because seriously, 1995 called and they want their technology back.

ahem.

anyway, on the pouringdown site, check out the Purgatorio vlog post from back in mid April, it is pure genius. you might have to watch it a couple times thru (like I did) to catch it, it's very, very subtle. Check his other links, they're all very short clips. some of them are pure performance art.

along that theme here's some of the stuff that passes for graffiti in Boulder.

this one's actually not bad. and it's got a cool backdrop too. I've been meaning to shoot this for weeks, but I've never had good light. seeing as it is now the season where it rains every day at 4PM like clockwork, it looks like I never will have both a) time and b) decent light to shoot this with, so I made do. I think the moody sky actually sort of fits the theme.

then there were these yuppie tags I discovered on an electrical box behind a trendy condo complex. hmmm. While I don't think the urban artists in Boulder have much to fear from the competition, I do have to wonder if Martha Stewart also got prison tattoos...

Back when I was a little kid and I couldn't really deal with big pronunciations and stuff these right here were 'blowy things'. Guess they still are. We got a ginormous wind/hail/thunderstorm going on this afternoon and I imagine these are in Wichita by now.

Hope you got that dandelion digger ready, lotsa baby dandelions ready for action right here. (edit: what is it with people and their immaculate lawns anyways?)

So, I don't really go for the casual / candid portraiture thing. I'm too paranoid someone will get pissed and/or confront me. as much as I hate dealing with strangers, this rates high on the trauma / to be avoided scale.

However, something about yon boy and his dog demanded documentation. Actually (and feel free to scoff those who know me) it was the dog that caught my eye. He has a really wonderful expression and was making a good job of being tied up outside of the single yummiest smelling doggy paradise in Boulder (Snarf's sandwich joint). Very well behaved little guy; he didn't even hassle the bystanders for treats but was content to gaze longingly at the Portal O Bliss where perchance his owner might (just maybe) produce a snack.

The fact that dude himself was totally oblivious to the camera was a mere side perc.

and this dude here certainly wasn't oblivious to the camera but it was just a fun shot. I figured since I was holding a bike, I could just hit him with it, or kick him in the shins and knock him off his skateboard if he decided to go all aggro on me.

I cropped this all wrong, but it's too late now and I'm too lazy to go re-work it in photoshop. blah.

I had just been to an ATM and was walking the bike up the alley (silly me for being all law-abiding) -- there are all these scary official signs back there: NO BIKES NO DOGS NO SKATEBOARDS OR WE WILL BLOW UP YOUR HEAD AND GIVE YOU THE ANAL PROBE... well maybe that last part is a little out there but there were big scary signs. and a lot of them. and all of a sudden this skateboard dude just appeared out of nowhere. so I just whipped the camera up and shot, unfortunately the low light meant the shot got messed up some with camera shake, which is why I converted it to a faux-lomo. a 100% crop of the original file shows the look on the guy's face and it's pretty priceless, tho why he thought some prat with a bike was gonna turn him in to the cops. whatever. I keep looking for the tinfoil, guess it's hidden under the toque.

and of course I can't post this without a shot of the trusty steed, without which none of this would be possible. well, it wouldn't be IMpossible, merely highly unlikely. I hate walking.

and I just can't leave it without the cliche beauty shot of the Flatirons. It just wouldn't be right to write a blog from Boulder and not be doing the cliche mountains shot, right?

cheers,

LFR

the power of myth

2006-04-29T22:13:00.000-06:00

"Man should not be in the service of society; society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state... If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times." -- Joseph Campbell, as interviewed by Bill Moyers in "The Power of Myth"

Global warming.
Gas Prices.
HIV
Road rage.
New Orleans.
Iraq.
Hate crimes.
Police brutality.
Child pornography.
Obesity.
Bipolar Disorder.
Bureaucrasy.
Corporate feudalism.
Divorce rates.
Homelessness.
Zealotry.
Fundamentalism.
Bigotry.
Moral Bankruptcy.

-- a typical sampling of topics on current heavy rotation in the NY Times RSS feed. Monster state? Looks as if.

The rituals of modern daily life have become completely disengaged from any sort of central meaning. Instead of teaching a child how to weave a corn dolly from the last shock in order to preserve the spirit of the corn for next planting, we merely shuffle through the seats of the SUV for change to tip the barista. There's no connection between the little bits of paper and metal we trade for a drink at a shining chrome counter in Seattle, and the earth and sweat of the Guatemalan labourers who produced the beans necessary to make it. Most of the time we never even consider where coffee comes from, much less could we find it on a map or say anything accurate about the society that exists there. This severing of ties to the roots of origin essentially gives us a moral 'free pass' from responsibility. Why should we care that farmers in Latin America can make more money producing cocaine than coffee?

It doesn't affect us.

Children in modern American society are no longer actively taught idealism, symbolism or ritual. They are no longer widely encouraged to play, to imagine, to consider 'who are we?' and 'where did we come from'. Instead, they are sat in front of a little glowing box, given a dry set of facts to chase, and required to record datum on historical figures, distances between planets and the chemical makeup of a leaf. Rather than read Shakespeare's musings on toadstool faeries, they are asked to track down eight poisonous varieties of North American woodland mushroom, and write a two-page essay, due noon on Monday.

Students are measured by performance from the time they are five. Quantifiable standardised tests determine whether they are allowed to progress with their peers. Teachers are pressured to provide results. Schools are pressured to make the numbers meet expectations. Where in all of this data-gathering and struggle to achieve is the sheer overwhelming joy and wonder of simply being alive?

"Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image." -- Joseph Campbell

Somewhere in the last century, the benevolent monarch Apollo was assassinated, his chariot overthrown, and raised in place was an enormous hydrogen bomb as totalitarian dictator. We are trapped behind an Iron Curtain of facts, and statistics have become the informers of our police state.

The power of myth is in storytelling. Storytelling with a basis in 'fairy tales' or 'fables' collected from the mythos of a thousand diverse societies helps to provide a basis of explanation of one's place in the world. It teaches understanding of other cultures and encourages a higher consciousness. Not necessarily organised religion, which has little relevance in today's society, but myth. Ghost stories. Fairy tales. Religious texts interpreted not as hard fact, but as historical 'ripping good yarns'. The power of myth and the need to understand our place in the cosmos explains the wild popularity of the Harry Potter novels and the Lord of the Rings movies. People have a central need to believe in the inherent 'rightness' of who they are and how they interact with the world at large. Lacking competent guidance, urban teenagers create their own mythos; i.e. street gangs, with their complex hierarchical structures and symbology. Myth is the lodestone that calibrates the moral compass of society.

Without this moral compass, one is rudderless, overwhelmed and lost on an increasingly stormy sea of anarchical values.

Minotauromachy -- Pablo Picasso (1935, etching)

The symbolism in this work of Picasso's is highly subjective. I find one can easily imagine in it Joseph Campbell's "monster state", the Minotaur figure (chaos, Armageddon). This monster has slain the "soldiers of logic" or "reason", (the matador and her horse), and the "philosopher" (the Christ-like figure on the left) is fleeing up the ladder. The 'audience' (background figures) look on from their tower with complete detachment; they are divorced of responsibility for what's going on. The only one here with the courage to face this terrifying monster head-on is the child (innocence) brandishing the flower (imagination / spirituality) as one might a weapon.

What strikes me most about this work of Picasso's is the detachment of the audience. These two figures in the tower, to me, represent the New Yorkers who will calmly ignore a crime taking place in broad daylight. They are the hit-and-run drivers, the colleagues of a battered wife, the social workers who place foster children in abusive homes.

It doesn't affect us.

"What destroys reason is passion. The principal passion of politics is greed." -- Joseph Campbell

LFR

split personality

2006-04-22T20:09:00.000-06:00

Welcome to the darkside, PC users. Fear me, Bill Gates, for I have purchased one of the new MacIntels with the express intent of weaning myself off the Microsoft teat.

About 2 weeks ago I pulled the trigger on a 2ghz MacBook Pro. Let me say that this machine kicks serious butt. Especially now that I've gone and loaded all my PC legacy software on the XP partition with Boot Camp... granted, there's something inherently wrong with watching Windows boot up on a MacIntosh, but it's saved me from having to re-purchase all my spendy digital photography applications, plus most of the cycling / coaching / training software I use has no Mac compatibility.

The best part about this is that I'm able to view and transfer files across platforms from either partition. I won't go off into the geeky details of exactly why this is so awesome, but the primary benefit is that I never, ever have to connect the XP / Windows side of things to the 'net, meaning the neverending plague of scary baddies inherent to Windows' craptacular security can't infest my machine. Coupled with OSX / Tiger's far more friendly and intuitive multimedia interfaces and the ability to Just Get Things Done without having to wave the voodoo chicken round whilst chanting prayers to the Gods Of Software Updates, well... my life just got a whole bunch easier.

Oh and to keep this from being just an eye-roll inducing nerdtastic rave about my new laptop, let me also point you towards the recent Boards of Canada music video for Dayvan Cowboy. BoC is great mood music to begin with, and the video must be seen to be appreciated. Very. Cool. Stuff.

Also, if you get the chance, wind your ears round a few samples of the Grand National album 'Kicking The National Habit'. It's not new, having been released in '04 in the U.K., but it has finally been (re)released in the U.S., which of course means it's now getting some airplay here, plus you'll get a couple worthwhile bonus tracks, too. It's another offering in the neo-retro's 80's revival theme, but it takes its cue more from the New Order / Police end of things than the Clash-invoking bands such as The Strokes or Franz Ferdinand.

ahhh. have I mentioned how much I love my new MacBook Pro? Not only is it powerful, fast, and completely hassle-free, but it's just plain beautiful, too. Check out the backlight feature on this keyboard.

Cheers,

LFR

fast boys in Lycra

2006-03-20T15:51:00.000-07:00

Here are a few of my fave shots from Saturday's CU crit. My student did really well there and I took a ton of photos. I don't know what to say about many of these besides I was experimenting with a few different techniques and just trying to figure out the camera. I converted the first one to black & white because I had a brain fart and somehow toggled the white balance to tungsten. When that happens it's really tough to fix.

Same deal with this one, except I also missed the focal plane a bit. I liked the composition and subject tho, so I tried out a new faux-lomo recipe in Photoshop that works pretty well. Doesn't look much like a real one, but it has a somewhat vintage feel.

Caught this kid with a panning shot as he took a flyer off the front. Makes a super nice subject, since you can see the chase all blurred out in the background around the corner.

Switching from the telephoto to the wideangle on this course makes for some super rewarding scenery shots... despite the many, many light poles in the background. Makes for mad barrel distortion, too, with my cheapy Sigma 18-50mm wideangle zoom. In this shot the distortion actually kind of lends itself to the whole feel of the shot, at least I think so.

These guys were flat out hauling. Check out the facial expressions. It never gets easier, you just go faster.

I was just farting around trying something new with aperture priority, stopped down to about f/16 or so and caught this awesome shot of Dave Towle, the emcee, framed by Catherine Powers as she soloed off the front for the win in the women's race.

I really worked on the panning technique on Saturday. I was surprised how many good shots I got, especially since I was framing up pretty tight. These are hard because you're shooting small aperture, slow shutter, and you miss a ton of shots, but between the auto-advance feature on the Nikon and just good karma, I really lucked out.

I liked this one a ton despite the missed focus because to me it really represnts what being in the middle of a breakaway at speed feels like. Kinda dizzy and blurry and painful and exciting all at once.

Last but not least, another wideangle 'beauty shot' of Arapahoe Peak with the B race in the foreground.

It's snowing today and I have Richard Ashcroft's new track rolling thru the speakers. I think I'll brew myself up a hot cup of tea and do a bit of online shopping.

Cheers,

LFR

the new ride

2006-03-11T23:50:00.000-07:00

Check out my newest ride. I've been sans fixed gear since I sold my old Trek to my bud Eric Reber (Pedal Pushers Cycling Team in Lowry) last winter.

That's right kids, I caved and got myself the ultimate cliche' hipster bike. What can I say, it was dirt cheap, it's my size, it's mint because the chick I bought it from NEVER rode it, and it's already got a front brake and flipflop hub installed. In other words, it came with the 2 major upgrades I would have invested in had I ordered one stock, and I got the whole enchilada for less than four benjamins. It's a 2004, meaning it even came with the original cool solid silver WTB saddle, which my butt seems pretty happy with so far. I was concerned it'd be a torture device from all the bitching everyone else has done, but it seems fine to me.

In my own defence, I've been riding fixtes since way before they were ever cool or half the poseur hipster crowd owned one. I built my first one in like 1990 or so, and rode it all over for race conditioning, because that's just what you did back then. My old one had toeclips not because that was all cool or retro, but because no one but rich people could afford clipless pedals, of which there were 2 ridiculously expensive, klunky heavy models to choose from: Look and Time... and you for damn sure didn't put 'em on your crap winter rainbike / fixte.

The new scoot runs some of these badass old Time ATACS because I have 2 sets (and I think I spent like a grand total of $40 for both) plus they're idiotproof, weatherproof, easy to engage, and I wouldn't be caught dead using death cages these days. Yeah I know a lot of people swear by Crank Bros. but after having thouroughly minced my shins with a pair of (L)eggbeaters at Dirt Demo a couple Interbikes ago, I think I'll keep the ATACS and rock the retro grouch motif. Emphasis on grouch.

This right here is what it's all about. This is the fixed side. 48x16 baby.

I rode ALL OVER Boulder today. Up and down, in and out. Played in the traffic, rode up and down the Boulder Creek Path, in and around campus, etcetera etcetera. Scared some cars, scared myself, scared some college kids, it's all good. Basically I did a cafe' crawl from coffeehouse to coffeehouse, and made sure to stop in every bookstore, bike shop and odds and ends vendor on the way in between. I drank some awesome peppermint/chocolate black tea and picked up a new Moleskine. It was a pretty crappy day, and it kinda snowed off and on, so the fixte was definitely the way to go.

I love this bike. I think the previous owner said she rode it all of about four times, which means I got it in showroom shape except for some FUGLY blue bartape which I immediately removed. I gave the whole rig a thourough cleaning, tightened the drivetrain, flipped the stem, swopped out pedals, re-wrapped the bars, measured everything up to my road rigs and man does this guy ride nice. It's light, stiff and utterly silent on the road. The geometry is dead on perfect and it's super comfortable too, even with the major drop from saddle to bars (not unheard of for track geometry). This frame shows as much seatpost as my Dream roadie, despite that it's not a compact / sloping setup. I can definitely see this one becoming my bike of choice for everything besides racing and group rides.

The sweetest part is that when I got out of Amante at 18.30 and realised it had started snowing in earnest, I just whipped out the 15mm wrench, flipped the back wheel (which takes all of 30 seconds) and rode home on the freehub side. I mean, I dig riding fixed and all but I'm not quite crazy enough to want to attempt the combo of fixed, dark AND icy... not out on U.S. 36 at any rate.

Oh and before I sign off tonight, give these guys a listen and if you like what you hear, hook 'em up with a membership. WOXY, one of the top 5 webcast stations online, a multiple award winner and one of the last truly independent stations still (barely) making it in a hostile corporate-clone ruled environment. If ClearChannel's craptacular programming has you pissed off, I guarantee this is the cure. Originally the home of Miami of Oxford's (Ohio) college indie station, their FM callsign was made famous as '97X BAM! The Future Of Rock N Roll' in the 1988 Academy Award flick Rainman. But seriously folks, I've been listening to this station for twenty years and they haven't played a bad track yet. When I moved to CO in 2001, I hooked into their streaming webcasts / netradio and they've always kept it on the cutting edge.

Cheers,

LFR

grab bag

2006-03-09T20:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a smorgasboard of shots, from a lovely Saturday spent riding around Boulder just shooting photos of anything I could get my lens wrapped around. These first 2 are details shots from the kerbstones outside my favourite tea shop.

Another kind of interesting experiment. I'm not sure if this shot works or is just stupid. but for whatever reason I didn't want to delete it, and those are usually the shots people say they like. This Golden was tied to the same parking metre as my singlespeed outside the Trident coffeehouse. I don't know whose dog this is, but she was a pretty photogenic subject. Shot this one thru a narrow gap in the slats of a patio chair, with the lens wide open (f/1.8), handheld, at night. usually a recipe for disaster, but you be the judge.

Glass block. At night. With light shining through it. Yeah, okay it's a cliche', but the colours are at least cool, and it gave me some interesting pattern / texture / composition issues to try solving.

Okay enough of the artsy fartsy crap, let's move on to one of my perennial faves: hot men without shirts! These guys were bouldering up in Sanitas when I asked them if they'd mind me shooting some photos of them. They were really nice about it. I gave them my email addy and told them I'd send them the caps for free if they were interested. Most people don't seem to care one way or another.

Sanitas is really gorgeous, and on my way back from shooting the rock climbers, I tried to capture the late afternoon light framing the rock outcrops on the south side of Sunshine Canyon.

The biggest challenge with these shots is that in order to frame what I want, I am forced to use my wideangle zoom, which is an extremely cheap plastic lens. It's not all that sharp or fast, so it loses a lot in translation. I'm looking into a new 20mm f/2.8 prime though. Soon, very soon.

Last but not least, a colour capture from a slightly different angle of last week's most excellent train. I'm definitely going out to re-shoot this one with better light and from some other angles.

That's all folks,

LFR

back in the saddle

2006-03-04T22:00:00.000-07:00

So I've been sick with a nasty case of flu for about ten days. Finally feel a TON better, but man for awhile there, I felt like I got hit by one of these things.

So I've a crapload of files from today's shoot, but I'm too tired to post 'em all right now.

tho for whatever reason I really like this drunken bus station bench. Kind of a cool screwup, no?

laters,

LFR

say what?

2006-02-14T22:11:00.000-07:00

Happy Singles Awareness Day, y'all.

Tho I rarely ever disagree with the lad, this time I actually gotta give a shout out and paraphrase Pat Stack. Y'know dude, you are absolutely correct, the Hellympics do suck without Jaime Salé.

Only other 2 Winter Ga(y)mes observations do I have to make at this point:

a) Ted Ligety on a slalom run is pure bottled sex.

b) Dick Button is a tool. And not a useful one, either. More like that annoying, worthless rounded-out 5/16" box-end roaming round the bottom of the tray that you're too cheap/lame/stupid to pitch... despite that both yer bicycles AND cars take metrics. Fercrissakes, dude just STFU.

Couple more caps from a couple weeks ago down ::cue Cartman singing voice::

♪♪♫ .. in the Ghetto… ♫♪

First one made me laugh. Only along the Front Range would one find healthy litter lying in a vacant lot, as opposed to busted 40s. Looks like hippies are just as bad about finding the bin as the gangbangers are.

I have a theory why Denver's music scene AND the urban art scene both suck: it's cos the weather's just too damned nice here. Seriously, everyone here is just too busy playing outside to be snarky and miserable, hence no one develops that pent-up, wrist-slitting level of black despair that months on end of utterly wretched weather will provide. Therefore the true edge for creativity, lacks. This goes a long way towards explaining why Manchester, U.K. has consistently produced a high level of musical talent for nigh on 40 years.

Here's a small taste of the lame-arse tags that pass for urban blight around these parts.

I call this the 'eh, hell with it man, it's too pretty outside to be all pissed off, let's go snowboard or something...' school of design:

Bedtime for Bonzo,

LFR

Scenery

2006-02-08T16:24:00.000-07:00

(now with more crunchy faux-Holga goodness!)

Back at it in the coffeehouse. Some days you get the bear, some days the bear pwns your sorry white punk ass. And some days you just don't know what you got till you look at the 100% crops on the monitor.

Don't ask me why, I just like this shot. I almost deleted it cos of the missed focus. Now I'm glad I didn't. Either it looks something like a faux Holga (sans wonky optical errors from the shitty plastic lens, monster grain noise, light leaks and come to think of it that whole Holga-esque je ne sais quois randomness that you trade off for the massive PITA of processing craptacular 120mm shots from a $15 plastic film body) ... or I'm merely deluding myself that it's worth anything.

I should go ahead and toss it into Flickr's How Crap Is My Picture? pool and find out.

This is one of about a half dozen mad hot evening baristas in Amante. This kid kinda resembles Keanu Reeves, except for the part where he's a tad more Asian, about twenty years younger, considerably cuter, oh yeah and he has about ten times the brains and tons more personality, too. So come to think of it he really doesn't resemble Keanu much at all, unless you squint a bit and he doesn't open his mouth.

Attempting to do some sort of 'day in the life' deal, on my ride into breakfast I took some shots I thought would turn out faboo of pink morning alpenglow on the snowy Indian Peaks... only to later discover they were an overexposed blown-out white mess. sigh...punk'd again by my complete lack of technical skilz.

I spent most of yesterday deleting captures off the Nikon's compact flash card and certainly missing some fine shots in the process. I'm getting to that 'knows-just-enough-to-be-dangerous' phase, although in my case it's more of 'knows-just-enough-to-throw-herself-under-the-bus'.

I was also tasked with shooting our office building by one of the business partners. I honestly cannot think of a less photogenic subject than our office building, added to which this is quite possibly the worst month of the year to shoot it. Normally shooting photos is a cathartic, zen-like process that I find both meditative and stimulating. However, during this project I vacillated between utter boredom and seething irritation. There is absolutely no angle from which one can shoot this perfectly banal Honda Civic of a building and have it look like anything but a white concrete shoebox. All the vaguely promising angles from the eastern elevation (looking towards the mountains, yo!) suck because that entire half of the building is awash with crap-o-rific toolsheds, storage crates, electrical boxes, shipping containers, chemical tanks, poles, wires, plumbing lines, and any amount of pseudo-industrial manufacturing site shizzle that would take me fifty years plus a hundred times more Photoshop knowhow than I currently posess to deal with. This is the only shot I took that I didn't loathe on sight, tho it did take me over an hour to crop / clone out the front end of the QA director's grey 1996 Camry, a whole new theme in the saga of irritants (uh, yo genius, why dincha just go ask her to move it...?):

Also took some captures of yesterday's sunset because it was the only thing that didn't suck about standing in the parking lot in front of our office building with $1500 worth of camera equipment and no clue. Despite the fact that you really know it's the beginning of the end when you start to shoot sunsets. The clouds were much more amazing than these let on, partly because I was too lame and silly to bust out the tripod and do a real job on it:

playin' with some different exposures here.

then I busted out the wideangle and tried to get a little creative with some different lighting. I really like that Amgen building across the street, particularly during sunset / dusk with all the reflections and the wild greenish lighting from within. Someday when I'm a real photographer (and to erase the bitter memories of the rest of this shoot) I'm gonna go all Architectural Digest on this sucker. It'll help once they get all the construction piddle and cyclone fence cleaned up off the east side.

now where was I before I went off about the building shoot? Oh yeah, the coffeehouse.

Here you are, a study in different Kelvins. This may look heavily postprocessed, but aside from a tiny crop and a one stop exposure comp to rescue a bit of shadow detail, it is untouched, and also exactly sums up what the lighting looks like from within this place. I've been trying unsuccessfully to capture it for weeks. I was highly pleased with this result, although I took about fifty shutter releases to get it, using an impromptu table tripod hacked out of a lens hood, some gloves and a paperback novel. It amuses the other patrons no end to peek at yours truly, a mildly unhinged looking character dressed in hobbit trousers and those screaming neon 2nd-gen Sidi Dominators, hunched over like some mad scientist at a corner table, futzing around taking random snapshots that don't look like they're aimed at anything in particular.

I don't even want to discuss how many shutter releases it took me to get the aperture, depth of field, colour saturation, white balance and exposure to resemble something I liked on these godsbedamned liquor bottles. I love these bottles. I HATE these bottles. One day I may even take a decent shot of these bottles. For now, this one will have to do.

O right, and having 2 cute baristas doing their thing in the foreground doesn't hurt either. Amante seems to have hired one of every ethnicity. Gotta keep Wonderland Lake's desperate housewife population happy! Last night's shift featured the chirpy Italian lad with the Colgate smile (who happens to be a mountain biker also) and our Asian Keanu-semi-lookalike friend from the first capture up above. This cat's hair has a personality all its own, and mad props to dude for just rolling with the flow and letting it be all badassed with its Al Einstein-esque ways. No, gentle readers, this is not Guido Hair, it's waaay too style-optional for that. This has that perma-mega-bedhead 'screw it man, I'm too hungover to find a comb' kinda mojo. Rock on dude, college life sure is grand, ain't it?

And when you just can't get it right, and don't have the brains, fortitude (or the right curve adjustment wizardry) to rescue it in post?

Right on, you gots it, when that white balance and saturation gets all up in yo' grill, you just go ahead on and convert that uppity bizzatch to mono! It's how all the hipstahs, trend-friends and the merely-wannabees are rollin' these days:

Peace,

LFR

Drunken Skiing

2006-02-05T16:16:00.000-07:00

Kind of like Drunken Boxing, only lots more dangerous and not nearly so elegant.

Look at all these fools! I was right out there in the midst of them. See that little speck up there? Yeah, that one, the one that's spread out under the lift like so much roadkill...

Shot with the Stylus, then heavily postprocessed in Photoshop (well, duh).

The next shot was the only time I took the Nikon out all day. It's too big for me to want to fall down on.

I need to study up on how to do good high-key effects in Photoshop. Luminous, soft high key and moody, grainy heavily vignetted B&W images are both techniques I've seen done beautifully and been trying to learn lately.

Blame the boys at Sweet Rigs for distracting me. I've been rigging and blogging over there quite a bit recently, meaning I've been letting this side of things languish.

Kudos to jdub and friends for kidnapping my lame arse and spiriting me away to Breckenridge on Saturday for what turned out to be absolutely THE best ski experience of my lifetime. Cool company helps, a lot, along with 12" of fresh champagne powder and a couple of personal breakthrus on the ability level.

Your fearless narrator here happens to be the World's Most Wretched Skier. Ever. Seriously, I've been skiing since 1988, when I first strapped on a set of knackered rental sticks at none other but Mad River Mountain in Bellefountaine, Ohio (all 450' of vertical drop - no kidding). Home of Midnight Madness, meaning every Friday and Saturday night from 10PM to 4AM the combined student bodies of Miami of Oxford, OSU and the University of Dayton descended upon the place to engage in copious alcohol consumption in preparation for nerving up to hurl themselves like so many fibreglass-shod lemmings from the top of the boilerplate-clad 'black diamond' at speeds approaching escape velocity.

My instructor on that first night was happily and comprehensively drunk. Which pretty much set the tone for my subsequent ski career. Since 1988 I've flailed my way down the groomers at some of the most prestigious resorts in North America with little clue and even less progress. Along the way I've done everything from the Starfish to the Agony Of Defeat Yardsale, but I've rarely performed much that resembles competent skiing. It might help if I skied more than one or two days every couple of seasons. In other words, I'm an Irredeemable Spork (SPaz On Rental Kit). A happy spork, but a spork nonetheless.

jdub is the cat in the green parka on the right. Tina's in the khaki on the left, and Ponch is the guy in the watch cap, centre, arguing about which way to go. I learned a valuable lesson: do not listen to Ponch, if you value your hide and you suck. He's a damned good snowboarder.

jdub and his crew tried, hard, to talk me into ditching the whole ski thing as a bad show, and picking up snowboarding instead - especially as they all ride, the guys can positively shred, and Tina is quickly becoming a Shred Betty in her own right. I've really considered it over the past few years, since I'd have to rent equipment either way. However, the legendary steep learning curve of riding always caused me to wimp out - I mean, I at least know how to operate skis. Sort of. And at Breck, at least, having a skier in the mix can prove advantageous in the flatter bits, where a pole tow can be a handy thing.

So once again, when facing the prospect of spending an entire day on the bunny slope with an increasingly sore, wet arse, when I could at least be back on the trails making starfish and snow angels and flailing about pissing off competent skiers in my customary state of Spork Bliss... well I opted for the bliss.

And bliss it was. The Central Rockies are currently enjoying the best snowpack for the past 20 years. And, because I was blessed for once with truly awesome companions, I was actually encouraged, pushed, and also left alone enough to start figuring out some major skill factors and put together a couple of awesome runs.

Check out this view, willya? Conditions do not, ever, get better than what we had. Warm, sunny, no wind, deep, fresh groomed powder. Well, it could be a lot less crowded, but that's what you get for going on the Saturday before the Super Bowl.

Ponch and jdub, I'll even be gracious enough to let that impromptu trip you led me on thru those godsforsaken steep-assed moguls slide. Mostly. You unholy bastards.

All of these pics were shot with the Stylus, which survived a couple good wipeouts and even a Flaming Yardsale unscathed, because it's small, tough and weatherproof. A good parka helps, but that camera is a trooper. Thanks, Mike!

I haven't known these guys for long, but I've caught on to the part where random silly acts pursue them like stench pursues a garbage truck. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but I'm never slow with the camera - somehow it developed that Tina here was offered $10 cash to eat this entire (rather large and disgusting) cup of Ranch dressing. She complied with amazing grace and aplomb, and even managed to keep it down.

That's jdub on the right, getting royally sunburned. It turns out Ponch was willing to pony up a cool $20 in the interest of science, but jdub beat him to the punch with a Hamilton, Tina accepted, and the bet was taken. She must really like that stuff.

As you can see, beer was involved in the making of this bet. Drink; it's the very tool of the devil, and this is simply further proof.

To the victor goes the applause, the toast, the $10 and the indigestion. Upon interviewing the victor after her successful bid to rid jdub of his cash, her response was 'eurgh, that was REALLY gross!!'.

And finally I'll leave everyone with a thought to ponder: Don't ski drunk. Cos afterall, that's how I got into this whole mess in the first place.

This has been a Public Service Announcement by none other than

LFR

Calling all angels

2006-01-28T19:10:00.000-07:00

So, I've no excuse for not updating the blog for a week. My sincerest apologies to the four or six people who actually check this thing. Been busy at work, but then who hasn't?

Mostly I've been dry for material, slacking, struggling with a post that just won't write itself, and contributing to these guys' insanity: Sweet Rigs; click thru that link and check 'em out. They deserve a shout, not merely for being a bunch of crazy dudes with a gut-bustingly hilarious concept, but also because they're providing a public service by ridiculing the truly egregious examples of pavement pollution in this our fair nation.

In lieu of writing about actual blogworthy topics, I figured I'd clutter the bandwidth by giving a shout out to other bloggers I regularly read:

Stop in and give the Waiter a glance. He's quite deservedly been nominated for the Bloggies, so if you enjoy what you read, go vote for him. I was a waitron myself in a former life, and some of his posts have had me literally doubled over in hysterics. When he's not funnier than a bag of ferrets, he can come up with some amazing philosophical insight; as a former Jesuit priest, he's got an unique perspective and the intellectual capacity to do so.

Cheers to O / Melissa, a famous, formerly anonymous blogger. It was her witty cynicism that drew me into the blog format in the first place. She recently outed herself and quit her legal career to go it alone. A great leap of faith that the rest of us languishing in Corporate Hell can merely look on in envy.

Not quite on the Celebrity Blog level, but no less valid or intriguing for that is my good friend Marty's blog. Her photography kicks mine to the kerb (in my defence, she's a pro, yo), she's a lot more disciplined about updating, and her witty observations regularly blow me away.

And my current favourite cycling blog. This kid isn't a celebrity... yet. But he's only 23, so give him a chance.

um, cut to random pretty photo that I can't think of where else to put, or anything really germane to say:

O, right, here's a link for a funny freakin' site, and it comes full circle on the I Hate Cars theme I started the post with (uhh... reaching a tad mebbe, but Sweet Rigs harshes pretty rough on the internal combustion crowd).

To complete the blog cliche theme, I'll leave you with some cheezy song lyrics that handily sum up my current jaded take on society:

I need a sign, to let me know you're here;
All of these lines are being crossed over the atmosphere.
I need to know, that things are gonna look up;
'Cause I feel us drowning in a sea spilled from a cup.

When there is no place safe and no safe place to put my head,
When you can feel the world shake from the words that are said.

And I'm, calling all angels
And I'm, calling all you angels

And I won't give up, if you don't give up
I won't give up, if you don't give up
I won't give up, if you don't give up
I won't give up, if you don't give up

I need a sign to let me know you're here;
'Cause my TV set just keeps it all from being clear.
I want a reason for the way things have to be;
I need a hand to help build up some kind of hope inside of me.

And I'm, calling all angels.
And I'm, calling all you angels.

When children have to play inside, so they don't disappear;
While private eyes solve marriage lies cause we don't talk for years.
And football teams are kissing Queens and losing sight of having dreams,
In a world where what we want is only what we want until it’s ours

And I'm, calling all angels.
And I'm, calling all you angels.

Yeah this song by Train epitomises a schmaltzy histrionic pop ballad that's probably already been mad converted to Elevator Muzak, but dammit, I'm 37. If I want to shut myself in my room and listen to it over and over again whilst clutching my favourite teddy bear like some angst-ridden teenager, I will.

LFR

Serenity

2006-01-21T01:10:00.000-07:00

No not the movie, or even the adult diaper, the concept. Most of us have heard (or invoked) the following prayer:

“Lord grant me strength to change that which I can control, the serenity to accept that which I cannot, and the intelligence to know the difference.”

Or something like that. I am broadly paraphrasing, as my wireless connexion is FUBAR and I’m composing this without the luxury of looking it up on the ‘net.

I do some serious hanging out at the Amante coffeehouse up on North Broadway. I go there to be semi-antisocial: to read, make notes on blog topics, do research, postprocess photos, avoid my roommate, and generally waste time.

I am loyal to Amante for the quality of their product and their atmosphere; the highest praise I can give in that regard is that they are Comprehensively Not Vic's. Amante's crowd has a functional mix of students, creative types and hipsters, not to mention the baristas are friendly, extremely skilled, and very easy on the eyes.

Wednesday night I’d planned to do some budget work, pay some bills, and perhaps write a paragraph or 2 of content. At 7.30 I had a consultation planned with my collegiate racing student.

The gods of Chaos had a different plan. The café was a little crowded so space was at a premium for my typical M.O. of sit down, spread out. I’d just gotten hooked up with my headphones on to do some serious composition, when the gentleman sitting next to me got up to leave… and accidentally hooked a corner of my casefile with his coat, causing, in a Rube Goldberg-esque chain reaction, a hot chocolate tsunami. Momentarily bewildered (who am I kidding, it's my normal state…) I froze, and failed to save the impending disaster.

I try to live life by the credo of the Hitchhiker’s Guide: I don’t panic, and I ALWAYS carry a towel. People rag on me for hucking round a metric ton of crap in the trusty Chrome Metropolis, but when you need a towel, particularly in situations like this, you really need one. I rescued the offending file folder (drenched for its pains), my laptop, my mp3 player, and the various peripherals to set them out of harm’s way.

It’s a fact: if you work with electronics in an environment in which spills can occur, at some point you lose the lottery. I’m good with that, hell I’m a klutz too, my main concern is to get anything that’s powered on out of the floodplain. This poor guy was mortified and I felt really bad for him. By the time I thought to hit Pause on the m:robe and removed the headphones, he had probably apologized ten times, and was on his knees trying to mop up the mess using the sadly inadequate foodservice paper napkin method.

I told him not to worry and set to work with my towel to catch the worst of the spill while he chased down a barista for a damp rag with which to wage de-stickification manouevres.

Here’s the thing: this guy got wound up into a hand-wringing fluster about a simple accident. It bugs me that in this society, the inference is that a random occurrence like this always has to be somebody’s fault.

As a notorious scatterbrain, I willingly own my end of this misadventure. I sat down in a packed café and hauled out a bunch of electronic gadgetry without first casing my surroundings and a wreck resulted. I mean, seriously, let’s examine the evidence:

Item 1) Someone sitting there prior had shoved the tables around such that his table and mine didn’t allow him (a tall, athletic fellow) adequate room for egress.

Item 2) In my haste to set up, I thoughtlessly set my plastic casefile on the edge of the table where it could (and did) catch on unsuspecting passerby.

Item 3) I have NO excuse, none, for having 20 ounces of hot chocolate sitting next to my laptop without a lid on. As my (ex Army) manager at Lockheed would say in his nearly impenetrable Louisiana drawl: ‘fastest way to learn how to do something right is to fuck it up real bad once.’ Old soldiers are positive gold mines of pithy maxims.

So disaster was (mainly) averted, the poor man went on about his business, no geekware was harmed in the making, and the worst of the mess was corralled and dealt with (honestly that was my concern; Amante is in a brand new building with elegant Italian decor). A new drink materialised and all was right with the world. Of course by the time everything got sorted, my student had shown up, and the chance for working on content was gone. C’est la vie.

Here’s the thing. Well, two things, actually.

I would gladly have just paid for another drink. Aside from any entitlement issues and the simple fact that when an extra $3.00 is gonna break me I’ve got worse issues to worry about, as I said above, I was at least 50% culpable in the affair. I know dude was being gallant, and I respect that. Still, I don’t expect.

The other thing is the comment the barista made to me later on. My student and I were lingering over some sports psychology issues, and I’d gone to get a refill. The barista actually made a point to thank me for being so calm. It’s messed up, when you think about it, that someone in this day and age has to be thanked for plain not flipping their wig when things go pear-shaped.

For Pete’s sake. Time was manners were the norm, not the exception. I passed off his thanks with some lame observation about 'well, I'm not an asshole', when, as we all know, I have at least as much propensity for being an asshole as the next person, and considering that I'm a bike racer, most likely twice that.

The difference is, I've struggled to gain and (mostly) won, over the years, the ability to take a deep breath and reach for the serenity in the situation. It has very little to do with manners, really, and a whole lot to do with treating others as I'd hope they'd treat me.

Cheers,

LFR

Oh. My. God!!

2006-01-20T18:46:00.000-07:00

like, omiGAWD... ::cue cheezy 80's synth-pop track::

Patrick Stack, one of my longtime fave bloggers actually linked my site yesterday to give props in response to this post.

If you don't read Stacked (no, no, NOT the Pamela Anderson bullshit Myspace blog, puh-leeeaze!) well, you should. Don't let the Ali G. aesthetic fool you, this man is tack sharp. Hell he keeps my slacker arse interested in (of all things) politics. That's about like convincing Osama Bin Laden that bacon tastes goooood.

Dammit, that Hubris post has gotten a fair bit of play and I've since received emails in praise from people I don't actually know. So thanks, peopleihavenocluewhoyouare, but kindly don't expect great things. As my granpappy, God rest his soul, used to say: 'even a blind pig can find a nut every now and again'.

Sigh... considering one or three people besides my mom and my best bud might actually stop in and visit the site over the next few days, I guess I'll attempt to raise my game a tad, or at least clean a few of the dead bugs off the windshield.

Cheers,

LFR

For your entertainment

2006-01-18T12:37:00.000-07:00

I'm a little dry for topics today, but I thought in the spirit of randomness I'd include a couple totally unrelated things.

First up, a capture of my (yet again) wind-oppressed ride with the Swift club from last Sunday, courtesy of my PowerTap software. This should keep the cycling cognoscenti entertained for .00023 seconds:

In unrelated news, the notebook search has had its ups and downs but after a couple fruitless and downright annoying weeks, I'm pleased to report success!

Not, however, before I totally flew off the chain and posted this Tourette's afflicted rant to the Denver Craigslist R&R board, tho. Holy angst, Batman, I need to lay off those double shot espressos.

Cheers,

LFR

Hubris

2006-01-16T21:54:00.000-07:00

Aha, now we've come to it! The cliche 'why-do-I-blog?' blog post.

With all apologies to those of you still languishing in Psych 101, please allow me to wax a tad existential (I never made it to college, thus was denied any appropriate forum in which to get this crap out of my system before the midlife crisis hit, k?).

Why DO any of us blog? What gives us the sheer hubris to decide that Our Opinion Matters... at least enough to immortalise it on one of these slickly encapsulated little Mc.html templates? And on reflection, why would any sane... or more realistically, even any suicidally bored person trapped in the Ninth Circle of Cubicle Hell voluntarily sift through the rummage sale of my (or anyone else's) ineffectually articulated mental processes? The blurry, shaken, noisy photos? The tortured poetry? The tangled prose? The adolescent rants? The cute kitten drawings?

Daily, more and more courageous, talented, misguided, brilliant, cranky, opinionated, literate, articulate, passionate, bored or just plain borING individuals set out to pitch these little tents here in the vast outback of the Interweb. With a tip of the hat to the Prince of Hubris himself, a blog can be a simple Message in a Bottle... for some of us it may represent the territorial urge; a metaphorical pissing-on-the-gates of modern society... or even a brilliantly ascerbic primal scream of self-actualisation from an anonymous corporate drone.

Blogs can be as simple as a tech-savvy communications device for far-flung relations, such as a baby journal

There are blogs about the daily pain of being an adolescent French girl (for the love of Pete!!).

Blogs about art.

Technology blogs.

A blog that makes an ingenious stab at answering every and any question one could possibly dream up.

Some blogs start out as simple rants on daily life, and via the transformative paradigm of the Net mentality (and not just a little talent on the parts of their authours, mind you!) become Celebrity Blogs. No, no, not blogs about celebrities... well not at first, anyway. In this instance, Everyman has become bona fide celebrity in his own right, via the magic of a daily public web journal of his toils, misadventures and peevish observations.

Personally, I find blogging (and reading select blogs) a captivating sociological peek under the rug of modern culture. Reality TV for the intellectual... no wait, that's me being a condescending pain in the ass. It's crack cocaine for the net addicted. Why else would I be up until 2 AM on a Sunday, reading about a 23 year old Bay Area chick who knits and has a somewhat disturbing fascination with cupcakes.

Blogging evokes the same tantalising sip of voyeurism as provided by the insanely popular What's In Your Bag? photoblog thread on Flickr.com -- the premise is quite simple: Dump out your pocketbook, backpack, messenger bag, laptop case, man-purse, whatever... onto an appropriately large, well-lit horizontal surface, snap a bad photo of it, upload it to Flickr, then add cute little interactive rollover tags documenting your scattered treasures. I Triple Dog Dare you not to click that link, then doubly not spend half an afternoon peering at total strangers' lives as expressed by the contents of their carry-on.

Much to the chagrin of many of the highly talented and creative photographers on the Flickr site, it seems regardless of how technically sound, colourful, lovely, artistic or just Bloody Damned Good all their other photos on their galleries are, the 'whatsinyourbag' tagged snap instantly vaults to the top of their click-list. The chimps in that particular zoo (yep, including yers truly!) are somehow inexorably drawn to gaze at an endless stream of iPods, lipgloss, Moleskines and used tissues, variously spread out on appalling dorm carpeting, banal conference tables, or hideous hotel bedspreads.

I have a theory. It's probably wrong, as most of my half-arsed demi-intellectual caffeine-and-insomnia-fueled pop psychology theories are... but here goes:

We are all Voyeurs and Attention Whores. Both. Simultaneously.

Is that a bad thing? Not actually. Not so long as we remain honest with ourselves and clear about our goals. Here's the thing. Blogging, photoblogging, setting up a brilliant web art gallery, rambling on about how much your roomate sucks, or simply dumping the contents of your bag out for the world to view, exercises a spirit of creative play that the majority of us leave behind with adolescence, in order to focus on grown-up issues such as bills, kitty litter, tax law, how to mix the perfect Cosmo, and whether or not that back molar's gonna need a root canal this month.

I consider blogging (for me, personally) to be a little healthy mental yoga. Remember the joy we got from fingerpainting in kindergarten? Setting up a blogsite and raving (or ranting) about Things That Matter to you is (at least in my opinion) becoming a very popular outlet in which disenfranchised creatives of all stripes may express themselves.

Blogging, in short, encompasses everything from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Most of it poised with statistical inevitability, amidst that vast clump of the bellcurve reserved for the staggeringly mediocre.

Cheers,

LFR

More LoDo

2006-01-15T20:45:00.000-07:00

A couple fast shots from last weekend's adventures in LoDo:

This one's FINALLY a successful long exposure shot! Whew! I liked the composition, even (check out the folks standing on the platform... they stayed still enough to register nice n sharp):

Here's a candid shot of a pleasant young fellow in the bus station taking the late bus back to Boulder, like me. Funny how random folks just come up n' start to chat when I've the Nikon, the singlespeed and all the goodies with. He's an art student at CU Boulder, and he had some serious camera envy. I guess the one good thing about getting old is having the money / stability / job to buy these kinds of toys with. I let him play with the Nikon a bit, and we started a convo about blogging and bikes and such.

Folks here in the Front Range are super kind and laid back about being candid / urban photo subjects, I've found. It kind of fits in with the general friendliness in the Denver area, I think.

O yea, I nearly forgot: a big shout out of congrats to the Donkeys for sending those arrogant Massholes back to whatever hole they crawled out of. Man, there was some stuff getting stirred on Craigslist about that!

Not that I'm a football fan or anything. I just like to see trolls get a richly deserved Beat Down.

Cheers,

LFR

Take this job...

2006-01-14T23:57:00.000-07:00

These characters right here:

Are the reason I'm happy to climb out of bed every Monday. Seriously. I don't know many folks in the corporate world who can say they enjoy interacting with their colleagues on a business level, much less actually get along with them as friends. These guys rock! Possibly 'cos they're highly intellectual research scientists and not your garden-variety backstabbing corporate pond scum, but mebbe that's just me being cynical.

Lots of exciting news 'round the workfront lately, which is why I haven't been blogging, honestly. The 70 hour workweeks have precluded much extracurricular shenanigans (this has included going in on weekends - yep you heard right, the Slacker Of The Century is actually putting in massive overtime!) In a couple weeks, I hope to have some really exciting news on that front, but for now it's on the q.t.

That and I'm in the market for a notebook PC so's I can blog from the coffeeshop like all the other hipster poseur wannabees. I mean, I already have more techno-toys roaming 'round the Metropolis than a thirteen-year-old Asian kid... all's I need is the trendy laptop, right?

I'm seriously considering making a break for the Mac front. The recent announcement of an Intel/Apple partnership running dual core processors, only makes it that much more enticing.

Speaking of highly-touted rumours... there's a lot of buzz going on recently 'round legendary pro glass manufacturer Carl Zeiss. From the tantalising hints on their web page, it seems there maybe a Nikon mount Zeiss lens in the future? O lordy, there goes my wheel budget for the next three years!

Cheers,

LFR

This Blows!

2006-01-08T20:15:00.000-07:00

aaaaAAAAAAARRRRrrrrgh!!!

Make. It. Stop!

This shit is getting old...

Seriously, for ten days straight it's been unrelentingly windy. And I'm honestly sick and tired of it.

Tired of struggling to go 10mph on the bike in my smallest gear at 300 watts.

Tired of 4 hour rides that go nowhere but pain.

Tired of seeing plastic bags in trees.

Tired of watching even the birds give it up as a bad job and go anywhere else but upwind.

Tired of ragged blown-out flags semi-detatched from their lanyards.

Tired of waking up at 2AM with the whole building creaking and banging like a ship in a high sea.

Tired of the deafening howl of wind in my helmet straps.

Tired of hearing the girders groan in my office.

Tired of getting sand blasted and dessicated.

Tired of dodging tumbleweeds.

Leaves.

Stickers.

Gravel.

Branches.

Bushes.

Insulation.

Tarp ties.

Garbage cans.

Holiday decorations. (fercrissakes it's past Epiphany, take 'em DOWN already!)

Other riders.

Grocery bags.

Shipping twine.

Plastic of every description.

Construction fencing.

Highway cones.

Junior sand dunes.

Senior dust storms.

Inattentive drivers in high profile vehicles.

Tired of tacking.

Yawing.

Struggling.

Pitching.

Swerving.

Guttering and getting guttered in half-arsed semi-competent eschelons.

...and all that.

Coming home on 63rd today past the Boulder Muni Airport, I truly felt for the poor pilot who was wrestling his sideslipping single-engine Cessna to a dead standstill in the Chinook, in attempts to make the upwind turn to land on the south runway. Last weather update reported gusts in the mid-sixties. This is insanity-making, unrelenting and I wish it would just frigging STOP already.

I know, it's been over sixty degrees, I shouldn't complain. But I can dress for the cold. There's nothing can be done about this wind.

It blows.

LFR

Over The Rainbow

2006-01-03T23:02:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the New Year!

:: cue angelic choir ::

Holy Portents Batman! Someone at Amgen must have REALLY been good, eh? Check this action out:
The weather has been... not so much bad here in Boulder, as just unrelentingly windy! Anywhere from sprightly breezes to full gale force hurricane type ridiculousness has been howling every day since Christmas. Enough already!

The good news is that my PowerTap is fixed. The bad news is the wind was so ridiculous on Sunday that during my 40 mile New Year's Day adventure with the Swift guys, I was actually sitting on someone's wheel, going 10mph, yet still pulling 250 watts. Ow very much... not to mention I'd already taken a deep 70-mile rummage through the Pain Locker with the Louisville guys the day before. Honestly, I never get any smarter, just older.

This morning, I'd not have gotten wet, had my ears nearly blown inside out, nor been late to work... but I just could NOT resist these shots. I dumped the singlespeed into a pullout along 63rd street, hauled out the Nikon and shot away. First 2 captures were made with the 50mm f/1.8
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And then I took some with my Sigma 18-50, at 18mm, hoping to capture the entire arc... nope, cos owing to the very low sun angle, this was a MONSTROUS rainbow that filled the sky nearly to the zenith. I'd have needed the Nikon 10.5mm 'fisheye' to capture the whole thing. And that's a pricey little bit o' glass, trust me.

More information on rainbows, atmospheric phenomenae and more wild water droplet and ice crystal optics than you can shake a stick at can be found here. Check it out, I dare you. This is stuff you didn't even KNOW you wanted to know, but do anyway.

Naturally by the time I was done thrashing around finding the right lens in the messenger bag, keeping my gloves from going walkabout in the hurricane and doing the dirty deed with the lens swop, the rainbow was already fading.
Now any photography dork worth their Giottos Rocket would have had a litter of piglets. Here I was, standing in a dirt pullout, with rain spitting down, and a full gale blowing, CHANGING LENSES. For those of you unfamiliar with digital SLR cameras, pulling lenses is supposed to be some sort of holy religious rite, where you count to three, neither two nor four, say a Hail Mary to the Oh God of Dust Bunnies, and preferably do the deed in an hermetically sealed cleanroom with choirboys singing madrigals and god-rays beaming down upon you. Well, maybe I'm exaggerating a tad, but in all seriousness, doing a lens swop not only exposes the rear lens element (that's kinda bad), but also the mirror, sensor and all those fancy electronic innards in the camera body to all sorts of horrible environmental invaders (that's really bad). Or so I'm told. And you shouldn't do it outdoors at any rate. Eh, hell it's my camera, I'll destroy it if I like.

Over the weekend, I picked up Nikon Capture, an imaging suite that will greatly assist my post processing. Photoshop 7 can only get so far; for some things (like tack sharp printable images from raw NEF files) the proprietary software is, as they say, the dog's bollocks. I'm already liking it.

Cheers,

LFR

Critters

2005-12-29T01:16:00.000-07:00

More shots from Ohio. This time a random roundup of the various critters on Mom's farm. All shot with the D70 and the 50mm f/1.8.

Meet Blackie, a rather photogenic 2 year old stallion. You're not seeing things, he really does have Paul Newman eyes:

Next up, the Queen of the Household, Ariel - caught in the act of birdwatching. Shot with the softbox and a gold bounce on the SB600. I backed the flash comp down too far, blah. Need to remember to shoot bracketed more... tho being a typical cat, Ariel was in no mood to suffer the flash for long!

Now for Mom's pet jay, Mootsie (getting him to sit still long enough to fire the shutter was a challenge!):

This guy was rescued as a fallen nestling literally from the jaws of death - a dog grabbed him in the park. He's 8 years old and makes a much more friendly and engaging house bird than any parakeet.

Before you get your knickers in a knot about keeping a wild bird as a pet, it's a fact that once you've hand raised a nestling, you cannot re-release them into the wild; they will not survive. I might end up inheriting this character someday, as jays can live an extremely long time; no one quite seems to know how long, but they're of the Corvidae (crow) family, and captive ravens (Corvus Corvax) are known to live sixty and more years!

Back when Moots was a fledgling, the local park ranger recommended that Mom just register him with Ohio DNR, get an adequate flight cage and plenty of toys (jays are busy birds) and keep him as a pet. He's got a huge cage, and is well behaved enough to fly free inside the house when the dogs aren't in. The cat lives in mortal fear of that beak and won't go near him. He'll come to your hand (especially for live, fuzzy, wriggly caterpillars... and wormses, ooo yesss preciousss!) and mimics all sorts of things like the TV, the telephone, the dogs barking... the fun never ends.

The classic comment after I showed Mom the fullsized raw capture: 'Oh, wow, I never realised his eyes are brown!' The camera literally pulled out details of colour and markings she'd never noticed.

Midge, Mom's 6 months old Border Collie pup:

Last but not least, the aptly nicknamed Fuzzy, a ginormous Warmblood colt:

That's quite the menagerie, eh? I also shot some decent captures of wild birds at the feeder, but they'll have to wait for now.

Cheers,

LFR

You can go home again

2005-12-25T20:50:00.000-07:00

I went home for the holidays, and the bad news is that yes, indeed, Cincinnati is still a festering cesspit, Ohio sucks in general, the food was bad, the weather was worse, and I didn't get to ride half so much as I should have liked. The good news is, it's nice to be home with true friends.

Speaking of true friends, here's one of Jason Reser, shot with my portrait lens and the softbox on the D70; about 1/250 shutterspeed, handheld at f/1.8, exposure comp on the flash backed off a couple stops, and bounced the flash off the adjacent white wall. Came out nicely, for all that we were sitting under strip lights in a Skyline chili parlour:

This character happens to be my truest, best friend. I used to work for him at his bike shop in Newport, Kentucky, and he's the most generous person on the planet. I've known him since he was fifteen years old. He's helped me get bikes, sponsorships and contacts that have all stood the test of time and distance. This is one of those deals where we can go for months at a time without corresponding, then pick up the conversation right where it left off.

The rest of these snaps were taken slightly inebriated, handheld with the Stylus, mostly inside the Taft Theatre at the Over The Rhine Concert. Had to use available light as flash photog is frowned upon there. sorry they're blurry. Thanks Charley, you are a real gem for hooking us all up with tix. You're a real nerd for being so camera shy tho. What's up with ditching us at the bar, huh?

Here's a shot of Jason and his girl Sari. Thank you Sari, for letting me borrow your Barracuda, that was really awesome. I wish she'd come with us riding tho, because I was hopelessly outnumbered by the guys. It only takes 2 gals to outnumber any amount of men.

Next up, the Unimpeachable John Wiley Adams. Holy crap, when did Wiley turn into an emo boi?? I first met this kid at a crit I promoted in Mariemont, Ohio. He was in sneakers and jeans, on flats riding his dad's overly large garage bike, all knees and elbows, and having the time of his life.

One of the most talented riders ever to train half-arsed and waste his talents: Adam Fuson. He and I were joint Ohio Valley Racing Riders of The Year in 1997. A shot of him, a shot of him, taking a shot of me, then the sneaky bastard took a shot of me, showing him the shot of him... eh, it's confusing, and probably really stupid, but we were enjoying it, so that's what matters:

And here's a nasty blurry shot of Over The Rhine, jamming. Blurry was kind of the theme of the night.

I was listening to Over the Rhine fifteen years ago at Sudsy Malone's, whilst waiting for my laundry to dry. They haven't changed a bit, but one thing's for certain, you'd not fit the 2,000+ people who packed the Taft, into Sudsy's 6x6' SRO stage allotment.

I only wish I'd bothered to take the Stylus with me when Jason took me night MTB riding out at East Fork. Man that brings back some memories. It was freezing, icy and SO incredibly fun. 2 hours of slipping, sliding, laughing, crashing and flailing. The Cincy guys go every Tuesday night at 7, all through the winter. I wish my useless bike acquaintances in Boulder had the minerals to go night riding.

Yes, Virginia, you can, indeed, go home again.

Happy Holidays,

LFR

simplicity

2005-12-09T20:20:00.000-07:00

The most elegant things in life are often quite simple. Tuxedoes, fixed gear bicycles and black and white photography come to mind.

Here are a few shots I took down by the library the first day I had my 50mm f/1.8 prime lens. All converted to B&W with a nice home-cooked Photoshop secret recipe of mine and a little help from my friends (thanks A. Shen!).

First, a lanky, elegant Italian steel fixte. The only thing I dislike about being short is that my bikes don't have the sorts of long, clean lines one gets in 58cm and above framesets:

This second shot was my favourite from the series. It shows the excellent depth of field one can achieve shooting manual with a fast lens:

And just a cool idea. These are free loaner bikes from the grocery, and apart from here, I've only ever seen this done in Amsterdam. They end up all over town, naturally, but have very low actual rates of theft; even when they're not returned immediately, someone always rides them back to the grocery within a few days.

Cheers,

LFR

State CX Champs

2005-12-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

Ah, cyclocross, as interpreted by the Nikon D70.

Here are a couple shots of Marty, from her spectacular ride in the 35+ women's race. The light was tricky, and I discovered later that I shot the whole thing at ISO 200, i.e. not high enough for these fast moving subjects in dodgy light. Mea culpa.
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I'd had the camera for exactly fourteen hours when I shot most of these pictures. I struggled, a lot. Some of them came out okay.

Using the SB-600 for fill flash, helped with the pro Men, as the light was failing. I liked the speed and conflict in the next shot. Jeff Wardell is the guy coming fast into the barricades, center frame.

The kid in the stars-n-stripes in this next shot, just turned fifteen. He barely missed out on the State Championship in the Senior Men Pro/1/2 field, settling for the silver medal behind no less than Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski. Alex Coelho. Remember the name, it may become important in the future.

Here come the Pro/1/2 podium players thru the barriers with a quarter mile to go to the finishline. You could cover them with a blanket. Or a tea cozy.

Another nice shot of Alex, doing what he does best: go fast.

Couplea captures of the Death Bridge, from different angles, with Vaughter's Boyz drilling it in the wide angle shot. The angle, off-camber and speed that you come onto this slick wooden nightmare, meant a lot of people careened off the railings, or just plain wiped out here.

Last but not least, this shot of my former teammate, Susan Einberger really caught the essence of cyclocross.

Cheers,

LFR

Boogie Nights

2005-12-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

Ok, ok, ok - so I've been saying for 2 weeks now that I'm gonna update the blog with these LoDo shots... well not that I need to make excuses but work has been kinda chaotic lately, and more importantly

I GOT MY NIKON D70 ON FRIDAY... WAHOO!

... so of course I've been nerdling around with that... and of course taking yet MORE pictures, that need to be processed. Yikes.

The even better news is that traffic to this blog has drummed up my very first freelance project. Tentatively as of February or March, it looks as tho I'll be shooting a local Elite men's cycling team for their website.

Trust me, though. The arrival of the Nikon does NOT signal the demise of my beloved Stylus 500... oh no. It's so much smaller, lighter, faster and more 'stealth' for candid work, and far easier to use on my cheap, lightweight, crappy tripod... it's definitely the one to toss in the messenger bag and go singlespeeding all over downtown with. As you'll see in the next few shots.

The above shot is self-explanatory. Union Terminal, pretty much the heart of Lower Downtown. One of the A-list fun things to do in winter, is to get up crazy early in the AM and take the Winter Park Ski Train out of Union Station. Highly recommended, very scenic... a Denver Must Do.

My LoDo scheme typically goes thusly: Get off work, ride singlespeed over to the Boulder bus terminal, jump on the RTD regional express (only 3.75 from Denver to Boulder, comfy and convenient) for a 35 minute bus ride. Read or listen to the m:robe. Arrive between 18.15 and 18.40 on Market St. in Denver, and grab a bite of grub, a beverage, and/or shoot a game or 2 of pool.

Here are a few pool players I know:

I shoot pool better than most lesbians. So I've been told by some straight male friends. What that means...? I'm not entirely certain either.

By 20.30 or so, the traffic downtown usually dies down to the point where I can compose shots without too much background interference, and in the more deserted parts of the warehouse district, even set up in the middle of the street, if that's what it takes.

Couple attempts at artistic shots of details on the train terminal. I tried my best with the compositions. The tripod definitely made things a lot easier. And makes for a conversation piece amongst my fellow pub crawlers, apparently. I lost count of the number of folks who stopped to ask what I was shooting, if I was shooting for a publication, a school project, or ??? I think I'm going to have to make up a better story than 'um, yea... I'm shooting for my blog...'

The highly ironic part is the number of people who walk up and start asking me for photography advise... I feel like a total fraud. My canned response has become: 'yeah man... I've only been shooting for couple months myself: my goals are to light the subject well, pay attention to the background and make sure it's in focus'

Sometimes one discovers interesting perspectives merely by turning around to see what's 180 degrees removed from the 'cliche' shot. Union Terminal is the second most photographed building downtown, behind the Capitol. Across the street from it is Morton's steakhouse, with the Union Terminal sign reflecting nicely off the windows of the pricey lofts above it. Waiting for a car to come along adds interest to the shot at these very low shutter speeds.

A similar shot to the B&W photo, this time taken in colour, from across the street, using the parking meters as added composition elements.

And a shot from just a few steps up the block, outside the wine bar featured in the first photo:

The greatest thing about night shooting is how it brings up the details in architectural shots like these:

And then of course whilst night shooting, one must do the time-honoured 'cityscape' shots. My friend Ricardo and I rolled the bikes down to Five Points for a little different perspective than the usual. Most Denver skyline shots are taken from the uptown / Platte (north or northwest side). Five Points is in the ghet... um, 'transitional' neighbourhood to the eastside.

Ricardo rode his bike thru the next shot to provide a little light streak:

Then we looked around for some details in the scenery:

The goal of the evening was to ride way down to the darkside of Blake Street and shoot some pictures of derelict vintage busses that Ricardo knew of in a junkyard. Some of these shots came out even better than we'd hoped:

Ricardo decided to take a closer look:

There were a couple of challenges to these shots.

The first, was simple comfort. It was really cold out that night, a bright, moonlit late November eve in Colorado is usually not terribly warm. I usually toss tons of extra clothing in my Metropolis, and R wound up wearing my long sleeve fleece (I had three or four other layers on. The white Columbia actually helped that shot turn out; were he wearing black you'd not be able to see him well on the fence.

The second challenge is one of camera limitations. The Stylus is fully automatic. Meaning there's not much control over shutter speed, depth of field or spot focus. The camera pretty much decides things for you, and you live with it. Which is one of many reasons I've dropped a pretty phat dime on the Nikon and associated bits. I think we managed pretty well with the Stylus nonetheless:

This double-decker provided lots of subject matter. I'm now dying to know what the story of that huge smash on the (onlooking) right front quarter was. That had to have been an impressive impact.

These 2 shots are where we bumped up against the limitations of using point n shoot. With an SLR and controllable depth of field, the cyclone fence could be made much less intrusive, for less busy compositions of the actual subjects.

And last but not least, after freezing in a junkyard for 2 hours shooting pictures of derelict busses in the pale moonlight, it was time to warm up with a nightcap and a bit of jazz before I loaded myself back onto the Last Bus Into Boulder (01.00).

I mean seriously, it's not like I sleep that much these days anyway.

Goodnight all,

LFR

Starry Starry Night

2005-12-01T20:45:00.000-07:00

I've finally gotten all the photos processed from my nights in LoDo. I've also been up since 04.30 this morning, did a 5k run, and been going solid all day. It's now 21.00 and time for me to sleep. I'll load the processed shots on my jumpdrive and post them all from work tomorrow, as it's bound to be a quiet day.

Thus, I bring you another teaser trailer. This is a post-pubcrawl shot from roughly 02.00, on a night of pure Van Gogh brilliance.

Behold, the winter constellation Orion, faithful hound in tow, caught up in a net of branches:

Starry, starry night.
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze,
Swirling clouds in violet haze,
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue.
Colors changing hue,
morning field of amber grain,
Weathered faces lined in pain,
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand.

Now I understand
what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen,
they did not know how.
Perhaps they'll listen now.

For they could not love you,
But still your love was true.
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night,
You took your life,
as lovers often do.
But I could have told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant
for one
as beautiful as you.

--- Don McLean, 'Vincent'

Sweet Dreams,

LFR

These guys are Swift

2005-11-23T17:58:00.000-07:00

So, I've like... nearly three hundred pictures to go thru since Sunday. But I've got a 4 day weekend and not much going on, so I'm taking a stab at it now.

This past Sunday, I met up with the Swift club at Vic's on 30th for their group ride. These guys are chill and very sociable. They also have good discipline and manners, courtesy of ride leader Stephen Haydel. Some good reasons to ride with them.

This is the typical M.O. upon meeting at the shop. The pre-ride coffee klatsch, as everyone catches up on recent races, news, family life, etc...

There are always a number of nice bikes in any of the local Boulder group rides to ogle. Doesn't seem to matter much to these guys that we often take a route through the dirt secondaries. For you enjoyment, I give you: one brand new carbon Look with D/A, one Trek pro team edition SL (Trek-VW regional team bike), also with D/A, and one Pinarello Opera with Record:

More discussion as to route, where and how long we're going to be riding:

Ah, underway by 10.00, not bad. The ride leader always has us meet a few minutes early to accommodate the terminal flakes amongst us. The guy on the right of this shot is our intrepid ride leader, Steve.

Okay, these shots from down by the crankarm, are kinda fun right? Well you should see how many I eff up and have to delete! These are totally shooting blind. Examples include...

The Strap. I leave this thing on cos I'm terrified I'm going to drop the camera at some point... it makes a good handle for juggling the cam in and out of jersey pockets, but as you can see... it totally gets in the way, a lot. I have many deleted shots of The Strap. This one actually is kinda interesting in a way:

The... Random WTF Was I Shooting At?! shot... but it looks kinda cool as a duotone, mebbe. Or I'm just delusional from lack of sleep:

Once out of Boulder, we headed out the Diag, then up the hill on 52 heading east. This pair were crushing us going up every hill. I think the young lad is maybe about ten, but he seems to have the power to weight ratio rocking pretty good there. He and his dad come out on quite a few of the Swift rides. I certainly wouldn't want to ride the stoker cage (aka rumble seat) on some of the dirt washboard we encounter on Steve's routes, but this kid enjoys every ride and never complains a lick.

The marvellous thing about riding most of the highways out here, is the massively wide shoulders. Riding 3 and 4 abreast, isn't a problem most of the way out 52 as there's ample shoulder to accomodate it. This road literally goes for miles.

Christamighty, look at these wheelsuckers! Why do I always let myself get pushed up to the front, in the wind, anyhow? And how in the name of Dog does this 6'3" character think he's going to get any benefit whatsoever from sitting behind my stumpy arse?

Flat!! ... goes the call, and everyone dives off onto the shoulder to regroup and check their own tyres for debris. One of the perils of riding these wide bike lanes / shoulders in this area is all the glass, construction staples, nails, boards, roadkill, goatheads, tumbleweeds and whathaveyou that get scattered about on them. Fall and winter is the worst time for this, as we have more wind / rain / snow storms, the county sends the sweepers out less frequently, and any and every sort of puncture device known to bicycles will get blown, washed or tossed onto the shoulders to lurk in wait for an unsuspecting Michelin or Conti. Erik and Steve have rides later on in January and February, utilising some open space trails, that they are adamant are 'Armadillo-only' routes, due to goathead potential. The Swift rides post a disclaimer on their website asking people to please bring stout tyres to these rides. Ironically it was our intrepid leader himself who flatted this time around, although I'm not sure what would stand up to the monster steel construction staple he pulled out of the tyre. I've seen those things go thru rims.

Okay you'll recognise this next shot, because it was in the 'teaser trailer' post from Tuesday. This is the only time on this post I'm gonna get all photography dorky. There's a specific reason I converted this file to black and white, having to do with the composition. There's a lot going on in the colour file, and the lad's bright yellow jacket there becomes just too distracting. I'd rather have the focus be on Brad, the guy to the left. Cropping the shot would lose interest of the tree and the eyeline between Brad and Dave (left, background) conversing. See for yourself.
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Back underway, we head out to Weld County, and I take advantage of the mellow pace to jump off the front and take a decent shot of the group on the roll.

Soon afterwards, we turn off and embark upon one of the highlights of the Swift rides... the dirt detours. Check out this scenery, and not a car to be found:

Let me tell you, shooting pictures whilst barrelling along one-handed on rough washboard dirt (and getting them to turn out for anything) is NOT EASY. Especially since I was riding my backup bike, the Morgul Bismark, which combines upright jittery crit/tri geometry with a straightblade fork, unrelentingly stiff Easton 7005 oversized bladed tubing... let's just say it doesn't take kindly to this sort of nonsense and I had some interesting adventures in the potholes and sand pits. I took a lot of shots out here, and had to delete most of them, simply because I was bouncing around too much to get either a) decent framing or b) decent focus (not to mention The Strap and other issues).

Another okay shot, with a little lens flare (my especiality, it seems):

One of the nicest things about the Swift 'base' season rides, as I've mentioned before, is that these guys actually do ride at a base pace. Meaning one can take a look around at the scenery:

Now, I'm a big fan of male booty, especially well toned bike racer booty, but even I have boundaries. Casey, dude... those shorts make my head ache. I'm surprised his wife lets him out of the house like this:

Which way do we want to head back to Boulder? Ah, thanks Brad... that way:

Speaking of scenic, here's another nice view from the top of Lookout. pssst, Casey, I know you think yer shorts are loud enough to scare the drivers... but try riding a tad bit more right willya? (Steve only had to remind him about eleventeen times...):

Last but not least, just an all around faboo shot at the crest of Lookout, looking down on Boulder Valley and out towards the Indian Peaks:

The End,

LFR

Overwhelmed

2005-11-21T01:26:00.000-07:00

Holy cats, it's late!

I shot over 300 pics today (Sunday... well it's Monday morning now...). Did a 4 hour ride with the Swift guys, then went down to LoDo and shot some night scenes. Here's a couple o' previews. Enjoy. I'll post the rest after some sleeeeeeep!

In the weeds

2005-11-18T08:53:00.000-07:00

There's been a merger going on at work. Tuesday morning the final results were announced and the end result is that a number of folks are going to be laid off round the company. Our site got off relatively easy, but this stuff is never fun, and we are a small, tightly knit operation. By 12.30, everyone had retired to the pub to drown their sorrows. Over the next six months, we're going to be saying farewell to 7 staff.

I'm not a big drinker, so I said my cheers and took advantage of the late afternoon light to take some photos out at Boulder Reservoir. One was the sunset photo I posted on Wednesday.

Most of these shots are just random weeds and landscapes, things that I find interesting. I've done some effects work on some of them, mostly just shooting for experimentation's sake.

Reconnaisance via bicycle is quite possibly the best way to find good photo opportunities in any locale. You become so much more aware of your surroundings. You're going slow enough to actually see the details in the landscape, but not so slowly that you aren't continually re-inspired by something new around the next corner. You have a complete 360-degree view of your surroundings, unfettered by windows, and uninsulated from the sights, sounds, smells and excitement of it all. Every time I got on a bike, even before I had a camera, I was always framing shots in my mind, saying to myself, 'wow, that sure would be cool to have a picture of'.

I was big into art as a kid. I drew constantly and got pretty heavily into charcoal, inks and watercolours as a teen. For various reasons, I left it all behind and no longer pursue those particular outlets, but photography has really re-awakened the creative drive within me.

Zen meditation teaches a student to focus by striking a bell or gong, then listening to the sound as it dies to nothing. When is the exact moment between resonance, and silence? When I'm behind the lens, framing a shot, I'm caught in that moment.

One of the joys of photography is that, while yes, there are plenty of mistakes you can make, and techniques you can use, there is no exact 'right' way to do things. Digital photography and digital editing software completely frees one of the concern with wasting expensive film. You can shoot whatever you see that you like, delete it if it didn't work, and go on. You are free to experiment wildly and at random. These next few shots are examples of testing the parameters a bit.

This 'Certain Death' sign is out on one of my favourite cyclocross routes thru the rez. The canal catwalk goes across a small, narrow, rickety bridge with a couple of good ledges on and off, and a skinny bar-width squeeze past a tank on the east end. The local cycling cognoscenti refer to the assemblage as 'Certain Death', naturally. If I'm having a particularly good mojo day, I can ride it in both directions.

A topic of recent debate is: should you shoot full colour, then manipulate in Photoshop, or use the camera software to take the shot as a fully evolved B&W or sepiatone?

After discussing this with several pro photogs I know, I've reached my conclusion: I prefer to shoot full colour, have all the information in the raw file, and use Photoshop to achieve what I'm looking for. It was pointed out that you can always throw information out, but you can't bring it back if it's not there to begin with.

I prefer the control and adjustability of doing these as duotones in Photoshop. I like these darker, chocolatey 'ferrotype' sorts of results I get from doing this, as opposed to the rusty oranges of the sepia mode in most cameras.

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The 2 versions here are good examples of a shot that I thought might translate well into a duotone, but the end result looks better in full colour. I thought the duotone might bring up the highlights in the silvery backlit grass. However, running a fairly straightforward 'high pass filter' in Photoshop, achieves better results in the colour file.

This shot illustrates why I really want a DSLR. It's very difficult to shoot exactly what the human eye sees, particularly in failing light such as this with a bright sky as backdrop. However, with manual control of exposure / aperture, I feel I could have gotten this shot to be much less murky and the 'pasture sentinels' (large solitary cottonwoods) would have come up in better detail.

Tuesday was freezing cold, howling wind and I was bundled up like the Michelin Man. I had a hard time taking some of these shots, because the wind was blowing so hard that it was blowing ME around... between my (normally) shaky hands, shivering in eighteen degrees windchill, and getting buffeted by huge gusts, it made for interesting times. Shooting with gloves on is a complete non-starter, especially with a fiddly little compact digicam. Shooting with gloves off, is bloody painful in that sort of cold.

Last but not least, the sunset shot I posted on Wednesday, with an explanation, and a modified version that I photoshopped.

This shot broke a lot of rules, and still turned out pretty neat. Shooting straight into the sun, isn't a very brilliant idea, but with an LCD viewfinder, you can get away with it without sacrificing your eyesight. For this shot, I really wanted the details of the feathery, backlit grass. The challenge was that shooting straight into the vivid setting sun, blew out everything to the point where all you could see was faint mountain shadows. I really needed some sort of polarising filter, and with a fixed lens point-and-shoot, that's not going to happen very easily.

Lens flare is a simple by-product of shooting directly towards a bright light, i.e. the sun, sometimes exacerbated by a dirty lens (I'm not so good about checking that stuff). It can be an asset or a flaw, depending on the placement and what details of the composition are obscured by the flare.

Pro photographers often use filters to provide clarity or colour cast to a shot. Black and white film is often shot using a red filter to sharpen detail.

Whilst trying to solve how to get this shot, I decided to experiment with holding my Rudy Project sunglasses in front of the lens. I had the Racing Red lenses installed, and the tricky part was finding a spot on the sunglass lenses that was free of scratches, smear and dirt clods. As you can see the results were pretty cool.

The shot could technically be much, much cleaner. A tripod, or even monopod, is really essential for most landscape photography to capture clean details. The depth of field and focal point are mediocre, but that's a hallmark of fully-auto point-and-shoot convenience. The midtones are underexposed, the composition isn't what it could be, and the horizon could be straighter. But the dual lens flare is nifty, and the strong rose colour cast provided by the sunglasses, makes for an interesting photo.

Here's another version, that's been run through Photoshop and had the strong red colour cast removed, so that it simply looks as if I used a polarising filter.

The key to photography, for me, personally, is that every so often it gives me the power to promote the mundane into the transcendent.

Cheers,

LFR

teaser trailer...

2005-11-16T01:31:00.000-07:00

it's so late, it's early, but here's a little something to whet your appetite for the coming attraction. I shot some really nice pictures Tuesday afternoon.

Have fun figuring out this shot. This picture is completely, totally unretouched. The only Photoshop I did, was to crop it, and that is God's honest truth. I also probably broke every rule available in taking it. Yea, yea I know, I've got a lens flare fetish, just shoot me now... and o, by the way... what the heck is UP with that wild lens flare, eh?

You tell me. I'll pony up the secret in a later update, if I'm feeling generous. Right now I'm off to bed and dreaming with Dido's hauntingly sweet melody floating 'round my brain:

My tea's gone cold, I'm wondering why
I got out of bed at all
The morning rain clouds up my window
and I can't see at all
And even if I could it'd all be grey,
but your picture on my wall
It reminds me that it's not so bad, it's not so bad...

I drank too much last night, got bills to pay,
my head just feels in pain
I missed the bus and there'll be hell today,
I'm late for work again
And even if I'm there, they'd all imply
that I might not last the day

And then you call me and it's not so bad, it's not so bad...

and I want to thank you for giving me the best day of my life
Oh just to be with you is having the best day of my life

Thank You,

LFR

fun with Photoshop

2005-11-14T21:21:00.000-07:00

Greetings all, welcome to Nerdz 'R' Us. It's snowing tonight in Boulderland, there's single estate Darjeeling in the Chatsford infuser, and WinAMP Shoutcast is serving up a voluptuous combo of Elvis, Stone Roses, Glenn Miller, and Black Flag. Puts me in a downright amicable kinda mood, ya know?

These are some of my favorite shots, that also happen to translate well to duotone manipulation. My deepest apologies to this guy for basically baldface ripoffs of his ideas, but anyone who knows anything about this whole venture, knows that's where I get most of my inspiration, insight, information, and the kick in the prat to try photography in the first place. Hell he's the one who bought me the Stylus 500 that I use for all these shots, it's an amazing camera, from an amazing dude.

I'll let youall decide if this is art, or crap, or just pathetic slavish copycatting. I'll load the original RGB file, then the duotone. In some cases, I've done a little tweaking with filters. Decide which you prefer, and enjoy.

First, the full color RGB of some aspens I shot up in Maroon Bells Wilderness back in mid-October:

Now, a duotone of the same shot. Cropped, levels adjusted, with a very low opacity film grain added to give it a slightly antiqued look:

Now a nice shot of the bridge from the 'Playing Hooky' post, RGB:

And the duotone. Little bit more manipulation with this one, did a bit of filtering, and added some dust/scratches. This bridge has tons of potential, I can't wait to ride the singlespeed out there with new fallen snow on... by then I should have a DSLR camera to really get nerdly with.

A sweet shot of the Indian Peaks after an early season snow, with late summer greenery in the foreground - you'll notice the original needs a bit of work straightening a not-so-level horizon:

Same shot, straightened, cropped and duotoned. The truly savvy might notice that I don't always use the same Pantone brown for these duotone shots, or even the same levels. These aren't true sepia shots anyway; they're channel manipulations in a duotone mode, using various Pantone browns as the secondary channel. True sepia is a much warmer orangey tone, these are more along the feel of... eh old silver gel shots, tintypes or something along that line. Most digicam software offers the possibility to do sepias automatically. I happen to enjoy fiddling with them manually in Photoshop (I use version 7, call me old-skool, cos I am). The aspens looked better with more black levels in the midtones, the bridge looked better with less, and so on it goes.

Last but not least, just a kickin shot of some teazle, with the Indian Peaks as backdrop. Teazle makes fun dried arrangements, sticks in yer sox, and scrapes the merry hell out of your shins when you fly thru it on open space singletrack with the 'crossie or MTB.

And now the duotone. I personally think this one came out best of all. I don't know why, perhaps it's just the proportions. I really like this shot. Feel free to tell me what you think.

As we fade to black on this snowy, chill November eve, let the dulcet gospel tones of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush crooning 'Don't Give Up' envelop you in a warm, wistful lullaby.

'Night all

LFR

Not So Swift

2005-11-13T20:59:00.000-07:00

Arrrrrgh DAMMIT!!! I had a nearly full digicard of shots from today's Swift Ride ...

and my dumb arse lost bloody close to the entire thing - fortunately I was able to salvage some lovely shots from downtown.

You know how you tell yourself 'I should...' then you don't and pay the price? Well yea. I should have formatted my SD card before I went out on the ride this AM. But I didn't. And somehow the files on there got corrupted. Thank Dog for Imaging, I was able to open some of the shots with that and save them as readable files.

Anyway. Dammit dammit dammit... I had a bunch of awesome shots of the Swift guys out on a wicked cool dirt road ride. Nice high contrast shots that would have looked killer with some fun effects. Oh well, there will be plenty more rides. I ride with these guys because they are safe, sane and structured.

Today is one of those transitional weather days. Yesterday was windier than a Senate filibuster, but plenty warm. Today was mostly calm, but colder than a witch's tit. Tomorrow is forecast to snow, and it looked and felt that way, all day. Brooding skies above the Divide, hazy ineffectual sun, and a nasty thin northeast wind that cuts right thru to the bone. The above was the only shot that survived from the ride. This poor lad was both underdressed and underrepresented in the bodyfat quotient, so he was skipping pulls all day in a futile attempt to stay warm. Which is just as well, cos sitting on this sort of wheel is like trying to draft a soda straw.

I played around shooting some nice pictures of the fall foliage near the library.

Roses in mid-November? Yep, we got 'em.

As well as some pretty nice autumn colour still hanging on. Enjoy these shots of the late blooming roses in Boulder Creek Park, right off Broadway by the ampitheatre.

Cut me some slack - I was shivering, using super macro mode, in failing light, without a tripod. I KNOW this one is not in focus. I'm learning... slowly.

This one worked nicely with some very minimal effects work in PS. Try and guess what filters I used.

That's all for tonite.

Cheers,

LFR

it's academic

2005-11-12T18:15:00.000-07:00

Not a whole lot of much to report. Friday night's ride was a total bust, which is probably not a bad thing considering it was windy and drizzly.

Despite that, I had a brush with serendipity, which led to a fine time with the singlespeed down in LoDo last night. Did some pedestrian-surfing, shot some pool, drank a beer or 2 and in general lived life on the fun side.

I spent today being utterly lazy, which probably has something to do with the fact that I didn't roll out of bed until NOON, ugh.

The wind was unGODly all day, leading to zero riding, tons of housework, several hours spent in the library, and most recently working at my negligible Photoshop skills. Here's an example of more experimentations with duotones... which just goes to prove I should Clean My Drivetrain (slacker!) before trying to compose these sorts of macro shots.

Oh, and by the way the tune 'Black Betty' by Spiderbait, kicks major butt.

Cheers,

LFR

Chilling out

2005-11-10T23:43:00.000-07:00

Okay, call it a midlife crisis. Call it having far too much time on my hands, cos I have a 4-day weekend. Call it whatever you will, but for the first time in six years, yours truly is no longer blonde. Opinions welcome, just keep in mind that if I don't like it, I'll just change it back.

Kudos to Melissa at Lather Salon in Boulder. Not only did she take my last-minute request for a colour, she spent THREE BLOODY HOURS getting it just right. She's a perfectionist, which is why I frequent this salon.

I've been living in the midst of an Office Space episode for the past 2 months. Our company is going thru a merger. And due to that, every damn last one of us has been milling around the orifice, wringing our hands, worrying whether we'll have a job at the end of it, and generally being a giNORmous bag o' downers.

Enough already! Today and tomorrow, I took the last possible opportunity to take my remaining 2 personal days off work.

So, am I actually getting anything done? Nope, nothing constructive... obviously if the single notable outcome of the day was a colour change. Well I rode the singlespeed, ate some pad thai and chatted on IM with a few folks.

Now I'm sitting here in front of the computer, finishing up some backlogged blogging, chilling with some Leo Kottke. Vaseline Machine Gun is the current track; oooh yeah, 12-string bliss. Look it up, download the MP3, you'll dig it, trust me. Dad and Mom used to listen to Leo, John Hartford, John Fahey and Simon and Garfunkel, among others, back when I was a tiny gromit. When I'm feeling particularly mellow, I dispense with The Killers, Depeche Mode, Staind and Slipknot and slide over to a blast from the past with my cradle music.

Tuesday night I did a little painting of the town with an awesome dude from down Denvah way. He's a cyclist, working full time, going to school full time, so I'm frankly honored that he chooses to share what limited spare time he has with my boring arse. Tuesday night was the most fun I've had in quite a while. We noshed on some greasy pub food, tried to shoot some stick, threw back some fine Belgian brewskies and... uh, I kinda forget some of the details after that, but the night just flew past. I got CARDED, twice even. I shot a few pictures, none of which turned out cos I a) don't have a tripod and b) had one too many beers. I'll upload the one that looked cool tho. Then I loaded my silly butt back on the drunk bus home to Boulder. Strangely enough, I felt ultra chipper next morning and wasn't even late for work.

I'm going to break down and get a DSLR camera soon, I think. I love my little point-n-shoot Olympus Stylus 500. For shooting fast action and daylight, it's great, and for taking with me on rides, it's incomparable. However, I've hit a few limitations with the full-auto features that have me jonesing for more flexibility and control.

Check out these 2 beautiful bicycles. I've been playing a bit in Photoshop, attempting to learn some skills. It's not a true sepiatone pic, it's a duotone with a twist, but I'm getting closer.

The roadie is Ernesto, my Dream Plus. This bike has been my trusted racing steed for the past 2 seasons. The 'crossie is George, my Dream Cross, also a late 2002 model. Ernesto wears Record 10, and George is decked out in more 'cross appropriate Centaur 10. I'm a Campagnolo snob, what can I say.

I typically don't do this, but I'm going to upload someone else's picture, just because I think it's so amazing. It looks like some CG illustration from a high-tech space flick or an illustration from some sci-fi graphic novel, but it's an actual photographic capture of a 'fireball' meteor, taken during The Taurids shower a few days ago by Japanese space / astronomy photographer Hiroyuki Iida. There are 2 geeky sites I go to on a regular basis to check this sort of action. The best is www.spaceweather.com, but you can also find some amazing stuff on http://science.nasa.gov/headlines.

That's all for tonight. Tomorrow brings more Shenanigans, along with a FAC with the colleagues at Dave N Buster's. Should be a hoot!. I'm going to get a kick out of their faces when I walk in as a dark brunette.

Cheers,

LFR

Geezus ima slacker - Picturama!!

2005-11-08T15:34:00.000-07:00

Okay, lemme get with it here. First, I have no excuses, I'm just flat-out lame and haven't had the motivation to do all the uploading of pics to this since Sunday. I've got things going on, yea... but it's not that big a deal.

Anyhow. Check this shizzle out. No less a rockstar than Andy Hampsten himself showed up and pinned a number on for Sunday's Pro/1/2 trip into the Pain Locker. Better check you've packed up a big enough Suitcase O' Courage before you board this train, o yea!

I liked the touch where our man Andy unabashedly rocks the Fredly aesthetic in a tee shirt and tube sox, hucks around a full-suspension MTB with big ol' fatties, spots the bulk of the field ten pounds of bike weight and 20 years in age... and still throws down serious hurt on his rivals.

First lap, Hampsten taking it to all those young punkz out there.

Lemme 'splain something... this guy is not of this earth. I stood within six feet of him on the start line taking pics. The man blew out 42 candles on the old birthday cake this year, and I swear to Dog he doesn't look a day over twenty. I mean he won his big gig back when Madonna still had black roots, belly rolls and a Brooklyn accent... and the absolute BASTARD doesn't even have the decency to be going grey. I had posters of him from his Seven Eleven days on my walls back when I was a teenager (and dinosaurs roamed the earth), and I'm pleased to report that omyGAWD, like, he's hotter than ever!

I adore this picture. I shouldn't have to explain why. Poor Teton here (loud kit, schwanky bike) kinda looks like he's about to puke up a lung.

Okay, okay, enough of me being a giddy groupie. That's 'Sky'Walker Ferguson on the front of this here thundering herd, rocking the o-so-sexxy Primus Mootry / Denver-Boulder Couriers teamkit. Yep, you read that right. An elite cycling team sponsored by a bunch of bike messengers. No wonder they're so freaking stylish. And fast.

This being Colorado, Land Of Anaerobia, it goes without saying there were a ton of classy riders in this field besides just some has-been Giro winner. Heavy representation from the Front Range Mafia, the Messenger Boyz, and Vaughter's Punkz. Throw in 2 current National Champions, a Cyclocross Worlds silver medallist, and the Colorado and California State Champions, shake, run like hell and watch the pyrotechnics. Kids, this field was as stacked as a three-way catfight between Pam Anderson, Traci Lords and Angelina Jolie.

Check out this gromit, willya? Fifteen years old... holy crap, this wart can't even DRIVE himself to a bike race, and already he's able to make the selection in a Pro/1/2 field. Christ I hate getting old. Where does JV keep finding these punks? It's a conspiracy, man.

At least my buddy Jeff here has the legs to represent for alla us old farts. All you not-twentysomethings reading this here blog, this guy here is your inspiration. Jeff didn't even get serious about cycling until he hit his mid thirties. Talk about your everyman with a day job, who's following his dream and gonna ride it for all it's worth. He is rarely out of the top 10 in these ginormous, talent-ridden Pro/1/2 fields. And 'cross isn't even where his bread is mostly buttered. He's an enduro MTB racer. He just does 'cross cos it's FUN... yea, fun like a double case of the crotch rot, but anyhows.

I was hoarse on Sunday night, whether from yelling or all the dust, I'm not sure.

Oh and Jeff, thanks seriously for helping with the singlespeed project, you are one fine dude. I like yer taste in movies too, bro.

This is just a pretty shot. Of a pretty lad, with pretty legs, riding a pretty bike. Pretty awesome, no?

Another instance of why I sometimes don't delete what look to be screwed up shots. I don't know why, but this one turned out cool despite the blownout background. The pits were kept busy with handups.

The lead group, busting it. It never gets any easier, you just go faster.

Here you go, a little sum'in sum'in from the Women's race. I've no patience for much drivel tonight, so I'll just let the pictures tell the story.

Some really slow chick, she only came in third (but 'cross isn't really her speciality anyhow).

Anne Trombley, former Olympian. She and Katie Compton traded blows for the entire race. Katie rode a really tactical event. Anne attacked way too many times trying to shuck her off her wheel.

This was the last lap, final pair of hurdles, with less than 300 metres to go to the finishline. Anne and Katie were absolutely killing each other, this was a barn burner, and it came down to a tyre width at the sprint.

My bud Marty, hauling arse. I took a bunch of pics of her, and she posted some to her blog. She didn't like this one, I do, so there.

Oh and some shots of the 3s, just cos I like the Swanky's guys.

This is how it's done, folks. Key is to land on your hip, not yer... yeah.

Swanky's has the handsomest teamkit on the Front Range, bar none... I may be biassed towards the maroon and grey scheme, considering I'm a Buckeye by upbringing. Doesn't hurt that these guys also rock the trucker girls logo on their buttpanels as well. Scha-wanky!

That's all folks!

Cheers,

LFR

A bunch of Shenanigans

2005-11-07T14:52:00.000-07:00

Today you get a couple posts for the price of one, along with some lameass excuse about why I've been offline all weekend. Answer: I've been BUSY. Riding my bike, partying with the posse', taking a ton of photos and in general enjoying my bad old self.

First shot up top is Marty, her boyfriend Zack (right) and Cindy (left), rockin' out with our bad selves on the inaugural Friday Night Dirty Shenanigans ride. It's a combo trail ride / cyclocross / urban assault / pub crawl that I came up with (mostly) on my very own.

Let me just point out that Zack there has earned my undying respect, cos he did a trail ride on the pimp new Look carbon roadie leaning against the car in the background... including riding a way sketchy steep descent in the dark, on slicks that the cross-bike-mounted amongst us :: raises hand, feeling sheepish :: were too chicken, old, female, or all of the above, to do. I humbly lay my personal, small and rather wilted-looking Handling Skilz laurel wreath at your feet, bro, cos I am Truly Not Worthy.

Next up, a long-arse Sunday ride. I didn't take too many pics out on this gig, cos I was too busy keeping up. We rode Carter and I got about 80 miles in for the day, including shooting a full digicard of faboo pics at the Boulder Racing Cyclocross (next post). The weather couldn't have been more perfect on Sunday... particularly cos Saturday's Louisville ride included a combo of downpours and snow squalls starting out. I turned off early from the Louisville ride, cos I was soaked, chilled, and not feeling the love. On a positive note tho, my coaching student is really coming along smartly. Now if we can just convince his folks to help him get some Buffs kit so he can join in the CU rides without feeling ostracised...

Next up, Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY!!!

F***!!!!

2005-11-03T11:18:00.000-07:00

So, what's the worst 4-letter word you could possibly say to a cyclist? Well, let's just say it blows George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words away.

Yeah, the F word... man, I'm having a hard time even typing it. If you're the sensitive type, I strongly recommend you don't look. Ugh. Keep the kids away, this is an NC-17 rated topic.

You know it's gonna be a suck night when you come out the door from a long day of work and see this noise right here. I go to unlock the bike from the rack, only to discover that front tyre was flatter than our gal Olive Oyl. And I've got no one but myself to blame for the ensuing comedy.

A little background information is probably in order here. I haven't owned a mountain bike in going on 3 years. When my good friend Jeff Wardell did most of the work building the SS, he bro'd me a couple of his old 26" tubes, with the caveat that I definitely shouldn't trust them - he's the kinda guy who patches tubes until there's more patch than tube. In the 2 weeks since the Birth Of Singlespeed, have I managed to drag my sorry arse to the bike shop to do anything about this? Nah, not me. In my typical 'I'll-ignore-it-until-it-presents-a-crisis" fashion, I do just that.

Wednesday night, it presents a crisis. It slowly dawns on me that I'm not terribly well equipped for this particular mishap, because the not less than three spare tubes I find roaming round the dank recesses of my Chrome Metropolis, are all 700x23c (for road tyres), on top of which I don't have a pump. Roadie that I am, I usually just carry a CO2 inflator kit and a tube, and go on with my bad self.

Did I mention how difficult it is to patch a tube when you don't have a pump to check where the hole is? To quote the Anonymous Chatroom Wanker: "ima moreon".

So I mess around trying to find the leak the old-fashioned way, by blowing up the tube like a balloon. This takes longer than it should and tastes nasty. Frustrated and freezing, I surmise that it's a faulty patch, remove the old patch, repair it, wait for the glue to dry, reach into my handy dandy trusty seatbag... and discover that one of my CO2 cartridges has been used. Eh, no worries, I'm a safety gal and always carry 2. I root around, find the second (and last remaining) cartridge, and air up the tyre.

Should be golden right? Not. As I'm riding along, I realise the tyre is losing pressure again. Language ensues. I stop, have a think, and realise I'm screwed. It's late (18.15 or thereabouts), cold, dark, and Miss Never-Carries-Cash hasn't any bus fare. Now what? Nothing for it but to alternately ride and walk the flat the 4.7 miles home to the condo. Fortunately it's almost all paved, and the paving is in good trim. So there I go, whumpita-whumpita-whumpita, all the way home.

Oh and for the merely curious: upon thorough review of the situation, it turns out a spare tube wouldn't have helped, and in fact would only have offered more opportunity for creative invective. The culprit was a sketchy rim strip; the tube was getting cut at the valve stem... so a handy roll of electrical tape was the only solution.

Fortuitously, I have four bikes. And like any slacker cyclist, when one's out of service for any reason, even pure pig laziness like a flat tyre, I merely recruit a backup. In this case, dear old George, my 'crossie, gets roped back into commuter duty. (yes Marty, I also anthropomorphise my bicycles... you're not weird... well, okay yea, you're weird, but at least you have weird company)...

And now for something completely different. Not only has the weather been incredible these days, but we've had killer sunrises. This morning I awoke at my usual Oh Dark Thirty hour, to find the interior of the condo awash in crimson light. I hucked on whatever dirty laundry I found lying on the floor, and bailed out the door to shoot these:

I swear on my life both photos are unretouched. This is exactly what it looked like. I don't have Photoshop at work anyhow.

The good news is the skies have been spectacular, all day long. The bad news is with the combo of warm temperatures and clouds like these in spring and autumn... you get Chinooks; a.k.a. the Boulder Straight Line Hurricane. Today, it's been merely sprightly, meaning 15-20 mph sustained, with gusts to 35-40. A playful wind, making for a great resistance workout. I got passed by a friggin' Yugo-sized tumbleweed on Airport Boulevard.

Old Glory outside my office, getting a workout.

This thing is a Boulder icon. (photo cred here)

So what, you ask, was I doing riding a bicycle to work, when I have a brand new, perfectly functional, three-week-old Subaru Legacy? Answer: I'm a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Hey life's an adventure, and where else could I have made the acquaintance of a baby sand storm and a big-arse tree branch, both up close and personal like. Fortunately Marty hooked me up with a long-peaked cycling cap, which kept the worst of the sand out of my eyes, tho not my nose and mouth. The messenger bag and helmet took the brunt of the tree branch, so that was merely startling and somewhat amusing.

Marty apparently got caught in a dust devil somewhere in central Boulder, whilst jabbering to me on her mobile. The hilarity that ensued was well worth any dust in the contact lenses.

I'm starving, and crunching on random grit isn't cutting it anymore, so I'm off to lunch, kids.

Last shot is merely a reprise from Tuesday, cos it's my blog, and I can post what I like:

Cheers,

LFR

Playin' Hooky

2005-11-01T23:17:00.000-07:00

Eat your hearts out slackers. What could be better than a mid-week cyclocross ride? Probably gloating to all you rain-bound misery cases about the fact that it's All Saint's Day (that's 1 November you heretics!) and 75 sunny degrees here in Boulder. Perfect day for a little R&R, methinks. Check out those mountains, will you? C'mon kids, follow me

So... WTH am I doing out on my bike at 10.30 AM on a Tuesday? Slacking, naturally. It's a Boulder tradition, straight from the folks who bring you corporate-approved Powder Days. Drives those East Coast workaholic types up the wall, which is fine by me.

That's right, my bud Marty (foreground) and I played some serious hooky today.

Oh and check out these smooth-looking characters, willya? That bubbly harmless (looking) chap in the Vitamin Cottage kit happens to be none other than the padrone of the infamous Front Range Mafia, Chuck Coyle. He'll break yer legs and keep on grinning as he leaves your prostrate corpse in his wake. The handsome devil in the blue kit is Boulder resident DII pro, Chris Baldwin, lately of Navigators' Insurance Cycling Team. I shouldn't even have to explain how fast he is.

sooo... what in the name of all things holy were we 4 loons doing in the Fox Park dirt jumps? Why, riding them on our cyclocross bikes, of course!!! Geez, ask a stupid question...

O and speaking of stupid - whilst attempting to ride a gnarly descent one-handed AND shoot a gratuitously salacious butt-shot of those 2 hotties... your intrepid narrator took a FLAMING wipeout. For the technical judges out there, it was a perfectly executed Triple Salchow-to-Flying M-to-Superman-to-Faceplant. Mad style pointz, high degree of difficulty and about a 7.2 on the Richter scale, punctuated with a veritable mushroom cloud of dust. Before you ask, both bike and camera came up unscathed. But I didn't get the shot, arrrrgh!! Guess that's why they don't actually pay me to do this stuff.

But I do try. I make a buncha mistakes, too. Some of the screwups actually end up looking rawther tasty, like this lens flare shot. Thank the God of Digital Photography for flash memory cards... I honestly lost count of how many shots I deleted on this ride. Especially the priceless ones of The Strap, The Sky, the Inside Of My Jersey Pocket, My Driveside Crankarm, The Trail Tread... you get the idea. Hell I dare you: just try shooting well-composed shots one-handed whilst bowling along at 15-20mph, on sandy, gravelly, sketched-out footing, on a capricious, squirrelly handling 'cross bike and see what results you get, ya chimps!

Aha, thought so... pffft, I say.

Speaking of Flaming Wipeouts... I busted a hump around the corner to get this shot... then waited... and waited... and waited... Apparently Marty stacked it up on something completely random and innocuous just before the corner. Isn't riding skinny-tyre bikes on singletrack the greatest? So many opportunities for uninhibited exhilaration... punctuated by fits of disaster. A properly shod 'cross bike is analogous to riding a high-strung Thoroughbred... fast, agile, bold and forward... and either steed will readily punish the ham-fisted.

Those dirt jumps are just 2 blocks from my condo, by the bye. With scenery like this in the background, one wonders why I bother going to work at all.

The great thing about these rides is how close all this stuff is to where I live. Every one of these photos was shot within a 2-mile radius of my front door. Checking out the scene from the crest of Gunbarrel Hill on a fine day rewards one with panoramas like this next shot:

Yep. Mountains are still there, with Arapahoe Peak prominent to the left of the shot. You'll have to excuse me for indulging in a little gratuitous shoegazing, but I honestly enjoyed composing these next few shots:

Just a wicked cool shot of the water tank at the top of Gunbarrel Hill. I liked the shape of the shadow and the way the light hit the cyclone fence.

Maybe someday I'll figure out how the channel mixer works for sepia... nah, I like this shot the way it is.

Cottonwood leaves, golden and glossy on bridge planking. Cottonwoods make lovely spreading pasture sentinels and are a native species well adapted to life in the high desert climate of the Front Range. As suburban yard trees, however, they're notoriously messy and drop loads of branches at the first hint of stormy weather... hence the name.

A shot of the aesthetically intriguing bridge span itself. Only in Boulder County would the Parks & Open Space Committee build a honking great steel bridge for a bike path in the middle of nowhere.

Another shot of this most excellent bridge, with Marty doing a styley little trackstand, a' la flatlander:

I can never get over how laid back Colorado open space trail users (usually) are. When I was mountain biking in Ohio, the equestrians tended to be ultra uptight and sketched out around bicycles and you had to be very careful approaching them. Even walking the bike and speaking soothingly to the horse, sometimes didn't help, and you'd get that wild-eyed 'O god it's gonna EAT me!!' reaction from most of them.

Now, the rule still stands out here: you should not ever charge up on horses, both for your safety and theirs. If you startle a horse, their first response is gonna be to kick, and the second one is to head for the hills. However, the majority of Colorado equestrians are smart enough to work with their animals to get them 'bike-broke', so to speak, so they're pretty well inured to trail traffic.

This gal was out cool-walking her 2-year-old Paint colt to get him used to the Teller Farm Open Space scene. For as young as he is (roughly equivalent to a twelve-year-old human) he's already super well behaved, not hyper in the least, and a natural at hamming for the camera. Yep, that nose is every bit as velvety soft as it looks. This colt also happens to be a distant cousin to my dearly departed old youth / amateur show horse... the resemblance around the head and face is remarkable.

Just a couple more shots before we both ride off into the sunset:

One of Marty

One of me

And last but not least, one more gratuitously glorious panoramic shot of the Indian Peaks, just to rub it all in:

Cheers,

LFR

Thelma & Louise

2005-10-31T20:49:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween everyone!

Speaking of scary, yours truly the bottle blonde needs to get busy with touchin' up dem roots... Beast on a barge, how tacky! Darn good thing it's Halloween, cos people probably just think I'm going as white trash this year.... EEEEEEEEEK!!!!!

Check out the hottie to my left. That's my main homegirl, Marty. This chica is seriously cool, and represents my oldest and closest Boulder friend.

Thelma and Louise. A couple of chicks bent on destroying the universe as they know it. I'd dig being Louise for a day or so: Hot chick with an awesome car, great taste in music and a big ass gun? ...right f'n on.

I mean, despite the fact that I like my colleagues and they pay me pretty well, I'm essentially a glorified waitress. And I like the name Louise, easily cropped down to something awesome like 'Lulu' or 'Weezy'. Frankly, I never cottoned onto my Christian name. The full version ('Elizabeth') is hopelessly Edwardian and stodgy. My daily handle ('Beth') kinda implies some pink-sweater-infested bitchy high school cheerleader. 'Liz' is just plain out of the question for reasons I shouldn't even have to explain. And rather than actually DO anything constructive like change it, or else insist everyone call me 'Eli', the hip genderbending nom de guerre bestowed upon me in my early 20's by my very bestest favourite drag queen, I just grudgingly put up with it, in typical LFR passive aggression. Blah.

So anyway, I'm sure you're all breathlessly wondering what deep globally responsible and paradigm-shifting topics a couple of thirtysomething cyclistas discuss whilst sitting around in the coffeehouse? Um... hellow, whadja think? We scope hot dudes, gossip about bike porn and dudes, declare open season on the twentysomething male population of Boulder (if only in our depraved imaginations), play with our digicams and in general annoy the patrons with our breathlessly adolescent fits of giggles. Marty also has this devestating knack of coaxing me to spill my guts about my current sordid state of personal affairs. No I will NOT 'fess up, despite that half the patrons of the Bookend now know, whether or not they wanted to. Talk about TMI, yikes.

Oh and FYI Marty, you're still contagious. I somehow accidentally managed to delete the cool shots from Sunday I had on my digicard, bah humbug. Eh, okay, sorry, I honestly shouldn't blame ya chica... flash memory is temporary, but blonde is forever.

Cheers,

LFR

The Bike Nazis

2005-10-29T14:01:00.000-06:00

Ahh, the Saturday morning group ride.

As any roadie with a social bent and a club licence knows, this tradition stretches back into the hazy golden past of Binda straps, Clement sewups and wool shorts. Throughout the U.S., any LBS (local bike shop) desiring to promote riding and sales of high end equipment generally sponsors / hosts a Saturday morning group ride.

To the uninitiated tyro, the concept of a club / LBS organised group ride seems on the surface to be an innocent way to socialise, meet other cyclists, work on pack skills and get a fun, relaxing workout in, right?

Eh... mostly. Enter the Bike Nazis and their conceptualisation of group riding, which we fondly refer to as the 'Tour De Testicle'.

In my... ahem... extensive experience (I meant bike related, no snide comments, please... well, unless you're a hot dude, in which case email me your digits and we'll discuss it offline) every local road cycling community in the nation engages in this quaint tradition. Descriptives vary, but when I use the jolly euphemisms 'testosterone-fest', Testicle Tour', "Weekly World Champs' 'Pain Locker Festival', etc... any experienced roadie reading this is gonna nod and smile in understanding. I've been riding and racing road bikes since 1991, and have since lost count of the number of Tours De Testicle, Weeknight World Championships, etc, etc, bla bla... I've been engaged in.

So now, dear reader, I'm sure you're scratching your head in puzzlement. If I willingly, nay, eagerly engage in these weekly rolling cage matches, then what in the Nine Million Names of Dog am I bitching about?

The simple answer is: it's my blog and I'll bitch if I want to. The complexified answer has to do with a tangled litter of social and training factors, not the least the fact that I am, and have been a cycling coach for years. In a nutshell, it's just depressing to see the Bike Nazis time and again engage in selfish asinine behaviour that serves little benefit except to drive off perfectly cool rookies, usually those of the female and/or junior persuasion; individuals we can least afford to lose.

I'm sure I'll offend more sensitive readers with the arrant generalisations, but to quote the estimable wit Marshall Mathers:

"I just don't give a fuck".

::Denis Leary Mode::

On your typical fast public group rides, you are generally dealing with a bunch of what the Mad Dog so eloquently described in one of his many Foaming Rants; IOW most of the time they kinda resemble an asterisk when you set it in a really big font:

Now I'll grant that these as(s)terisks come in all shapes and flavours, but generally you're dealing with one of the following subclasses:

1) The Pseudo-Racer: The bulk of the "racers" in team jerseys on these rides are the sorts of club racers and/or tri-geeks who are too chickenshitted to show up at a mass start event. They thus limit their actual race days to one or two ITT or hillclimb events per year, and often do quite well at these since there's no denying they're strong, plus they don't have to focus on any sort of skills or tactics besides riding one speed as hard as they can for a predetermined length of time. Pseudo-racers will go on every group ride their club holds because a) they aren't training for anything besides the weekly Testicle Tour and the annual Mount Doom Hillclimb, thus they're not suffering dead legs from having done a brutal race the previous Saturday, Sunday and/or Tuesday night; and b) To justify their existence and the "team" jersey they've bought, they feel compelled to prove to everyone else just how tough they are. These sorts of riders almost universally have terrible pack skills, know (and care) zilch about safety and love to ride around pretending they're Europros by blowing stop signs and riding three and four abreast blocking traffic. They'd ride without helmets if they could get away with it, thankfully most LBS hosted rides forbid it.

2) The Century King: Another subset are your fast recreational types. These guys don't care to race, and they don't give a crap about training in any organised fashion. They just want a hard workout, and in the process of doing this, they like to feed their own egos by boasting about how high an average speed they can maintain, and what "real racers" they are able to drop on any given ride. These guys have even worse group skills and manners than Subclass 1. They are often to be seen sporting permanently attached aerobars, helmet mirrors and Nashbar closeout deal jerseys. They generally don't give a snowflake on a hot stove about "development" (their own or anyone else's) or "encouraging new riders". Screw that noise, their goal is to get their workout in by dropping as many riders as they are physically capable of, and everyone else else be damned. I've actually heard one of these prats boasting how hard they "dropped" former Euro-pro Jonathon Vaughters (who happened to be riding in old CA kit, hence recognisable). I know JV pretty well, so what this donkey probably didn't suss onto is that JV had almost certainly been out 5 hours to the asshat's one (not to mention on a recovery lap from an interval set, to boot).

3) The Wannabe: A third subset are essentially poseurs who do group rides to facilitate their personal sense of identity. These are often has-been or never-was racer groupies who are now well-upholstered fiftysomethings. These guys show up with matched Euro team kit straining over their ample midriffs, World Champion edition shoes, on the latest unobtanium frameset. Considering said frameset was originally designed for a buck-twenty Basque climber, it creaks ominously beneath their Biggie Sized buns. These are the guys who either 'forget' their lid at home or let their handlebars wear it at any and all opportunity. They wag their jaws ceaselessly about how fast they "used to be" or "are gonna be". They typically get dropped like a bad habit on the first climb though, so at least you won't have to listen to it for long.

4) The Henpecked Spouse: These are the riders who do race occasionally througout the season, but who are only able to negotiate a "hall pass" to do so on a limited number of weekends, due to family / lifestyle constraints and a nagging spouse with limited understanding of their partner's desire for personal fulfillment, and Gestapo-esque control of any expenditure not directly targeted towards home improvement or personal haberdashery needs. These riders must achieve their race-pace miles and group skills building whenever and wherever they can, and ad hoc training is difficult to impossible to work around their 40+ hour/week jobs, in-law requirements, and the obligations of serving as social coordinator and taxi service for the offspring. The LBS group rides at least offer an acceptable schedule / structure for them to get a regular workout. These are the guys sporting faded, ripped local team kit circa 1997, shoes they bought during the Clinton administration, ride ten-year-old knackered Cannondales, and are damned fast by virtue of being pissed off at the world in general.

::/Denis Leary Mode::

So... you're still wondering. If I have such an issue dealing with a stack of douchebags on a weekly basis, then why the heck don't I just go do my own ride. Well, quite a bit of the time, I do. I ride solo to work every day. I do long solo interval workouts when I need specificity in my training. And I know this is really hard to believe, but I do get sick of myself (it's easy, trust me).

Honestly, I'm fortunate. The club I belong to has a couple of motivated, sane individuals who either work at the LBS or show up regularly on rides. These guys are strong AND smart, a rare combo in the cycling subspecies Lycratus microencephalus roadii roadii They generally take it upon themselves to alternately praise, bust heads and enforce the 'first hour no-drop' rule. This is why I do this ride. I know that the first hour of the ride will, indeed, be a proper warm up and social klatch. After which we can let the dogs out, have fun, and all bets are off. The transition generally occurs after a pee break, at which time neophytes are warned that the gloves are gonna come off; the wise ones typically elect to turn for home. It's a positively civilised idea: a friendly group ride where one can still indulge in some good old-fashioned head-banging anaerobia. Usually without pissing anyone off.

In a nutshell, I've found a group of generally good dudes. Besides which, riding by myself, I certainly don't get the chance to gaze at lovely scenery such as this:

Cheers,

LFR

Cars R Coffins ™

2005-10-28T08:36:00.000-06:00

With all due respect to the dudes at the CRC site... they're right.

I had to thump some donkey's minivan last night on my rush-hour scramble. I mean, I don't deny you your Gawd-given Amurikan right to drive in the bike lane, Poindexter. Just make sure to do so when I'm not IN it, k??

It's a beautiful day in the neighbourhood, kids. Let's go visit with our neighbour, Mr. Ugly American, shall we? Oh look, speak of the devil, he's waddling out the door to climb into his Stupid Useless Vehicle. Cell phone in hand, vapid expression in place, our hero puts his mouth in gear, disengages his brain, and rolls off to Whorebuck's for his daily Fat Injection.

While consuming his 780 calories of venti-creme-caramel-flavoured bliss our boy goes on a caffeine and stress-induced miniriot. Internal dialogue sounds something like this:

"Holy hell, look at all this traffic! Jeezus, where did all these assclowns come from? Why can't they just getthehellouttamyway... dammit why won't you TURN ALREADY you stupid cow... god I ALWAYS miss that light... oh you're gonna honk at ME you bastard, you're number one, lemme show ya..."

Late for work again, with LDL-clogged arteries throbbing dangerously close to core breach status, dude proceeds to snag a donut and sits down in his little grey cubicle to embark on a day of chat room surfing, blogging, making his colleagues' lives hell and in general being a wart on the pasty white ass of society. At 12.00, he'll roll out to McDammit's and plow some gutbombs. At 17.00, he's gonna climb back in the Cage O' Death and do the Freeway Stress Fandango back to the old neighbourhood for some beer and pizza in front of the T.V., probably whilst watching the latest sitcom

Kinda makes me glad I ride my bike back and forth to work every day, DESPITE the occasional donkeys-in-minivans scenario as referenced above. How about you? Oh, I see. Too hot. Too cold. Too wet. Too windy. Too much hassle. Too too. Gotcha. No worries, mate. Checked your blood sugar lately? How those cholesterol numbers looking? Seen yer little buddy Mr. Winkie recently? How's about yer feet?

Human beings were not designed to sit on their asses in a 6' x 8' grey fabric box all day. Despite appearances to the contrary (yea, I know I'm sarcastic, so bite me), in person I'm actually happy, healthy, lean, fit and alert, a condition brought about mainly by the expedient of riding a 2-wheeled child's toy back and forth to work every day.

Commuting and training on a bicycle makes me feel alive, rejuvenated, and sharply aware of both my surroundings and my human frailty. Perhaps I'm regressing to the childhood / young adulthood that for various reasons I was always too busy or pressured by other responsibilities to enjoy. Okay, sure, I'm going through a midlife crisis. Whatever. All I know is that it's a good thing.

Stop rationalising. Get pedalling. Go ride a bike.

Cheers,

LFR

O.F.S.

2005-10-27T16:52:00.000-06:00

Konichiwa, suckas

Last night I built a singlespeed. Why? says you. Well, for one I'm sick of riding my pimp Colnagos in the rain, and in case you hadn't noticed, we do get some winter here in Boulder. Generally from about 1 September thru mid-May, barring random timeouts for seventy-five degree weather in January.

Singlespeeding. Grace. Power. Simplicity. Souplesse. The opportunity to beat the Frickin Jesus™ outa some pretentious squirrelassed bastard on a $5000 Merlin Ti?

Priceless.

Especially whilst one is dressed like a homeless crack addict in jeans and a hoodie, toting fifteen pounds o' krap in a messenger bag.

That's all for now; I'll edit this thing once I get a handle on the mysteries of .html tags and all that noise. Picture hosting, links, it's all new to me, so be gentle. Or if you're gonna be nasty, at least say something amusingly scathing so as to warrant a Right And Proper Beatdown.

Cheers,

LFR