Assbike Song: Gone Biggie Gone

One the best "forgotten" bands from the 90s is The Violent Femmes. Hearing this reminded me of their genius.

Sound Advice mixes Biggie Smalls with Gnarls Barkley's Casio-tone cover of "Gone Daddy Gone".

Sound Advice: Gone Biggie Gone (4.7 megs).

Cure for the Common Cold

Yesterday, out of the blue I started coming down with a cold. It came on like a flash. My head became congested, my nose started to drip and I started to hack (as in cough, not as in committing cyber crimes).

An old sage (actually just an old schmoe) at the Mayday Malone's claimed that Rickard's Red was the universal remedy. So I went to the bar with my copy of Foucault's Pendulum and ordered up a pint of Rickard's. The taste was perfect, not sweet, not acidic and not too fizzy, and a touch bitter. It went down easy. Like a cool gentle tea.

Since it was also pizza day I ordered up one spicy pizza. Before the pizza came I ordered a second. I decided I would keep drinking these Rickards' until I started to feel drunk. When I pizza came, I loaded it up with red pepper flakes, and I ordered a third. Mel Gibson would be scrawling swastikas on the napkin by now - but I wasn't feeling the effects of the booze at all.

I worked on a fourth, my congestion was easing and my head felt better. I plowed through page after page of Eco's masterpiece. Casaubon's time in Rio, the meeting with Signor Garamond.

When I ordered up a fifth the bartender remarked he'd never served me five beers before, but I felt like I hadn't even had the first. Obviously the germs were absorbing the alcohol. I was drowning them in booze. Maybe this would work after all.

After five, still sharp as a tack and steady as a rock - I walked outta there like Ward Cleaver. Still, I dreaded the next day. Had I really licked this cold or would I get rocked by some deadly cold plus hangover combo ? And feel even worse ? like the dreaded thousand pounds of ass ?

Next morning, I woke a bit later than usual, still my nose was clear, my head didn't pound. I didn't feel 100%, still I was a lot better than I was fifteen hours ago, maybe 80%. Was this the cure ? Or the 80% cure. It sure was worth it, for the $25 or so. Or was it the spice ? Or did any of that stuff make any difference at all ? After all, I didn't have a control subject.

But next time I'm coming down with a cold, I will try the Rickard's trick again.

It's Official ...

Bluetooth headsets are the new fanny-pack.

Sure they're practical and convenient, but unless you're a Japanese-teenage-graffiti-artist it will just make you look like a knob. Along with girl-jeans and vintage tees this is a look portly white dudes cannot pull off.

Assbike Song: Phenomena

Back in the 80s everyone thought music in the future would sound like this glam-funk stomper.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Phenomena (6.5 MB).

Unfortunately the rest of the album sounds nothing like this.

Guilty Pleasures

Sports Guy turned me on to the guilty pleasure of MTV's The Hills a few months back. So when I finally got my computer back up I went on a downloading binge to catch up on missed episodes.

(tip: If you are on Rogers and you use Bitorrent your speeds will be ass-slow unless you use encryption, then it works okay)

It's a reality show about Lauren; a slightly dim-witted everygirl who moves to LA to go to fashion school and work at Teen Vogue. We watch her as she tries so so hard to please her rich bum boyfriend and her selfish slacker best friend, Heidi.

The only likable character is Whitney, her co-intern at Vogue. In fact she is a charmer. It's sickening, but irresistable to watch Lauren try to act happy for Whitney, when (the smarter and harder working) Whitney gets cool jobs and promotions.

The main pitfall of the show is that none of the characters are remotely interesting. The dudes are especially lame, and so hard to tell apart, since they are all beefy fratboy types who call each other "broe" and do little else. Luckily the episodes are only 20 minutes long, so it's over before you can get really bored.

Catching up on The Hills is also a nice change from Dog the Bounty Hunter marathons on A&E. A&E and TLC: pioneers of the goatee/tattoo/black T-shirt documentary show genre.

They're Tits Buddy !

Thursday after our ride we usually chill out on this patio for a bit, so I'm sitting there and this chick with huge boobs -- and in an outfit that screams "stare at my tits" -- is walking to her car when some dude goes by kinda staring at her rack and she yells "They're tits baby!". Ooooh! We laughed our asses.

Is there an Eco in Here ?

My computer had some issues -- which I traced to some loose memory chips, so I missed out onh a few weeks of blogging. But Assbike Magazine is back in business baby.

I never get around to just reading for fun, since I always have school hanging obver my head, and I feel if I am reading I should be reading shit to do with work. But I did manage to pick up two books in the past week (of course I was suposed to be getting finanace textbooks).

I found "Juiced", Jose Canseco's autobiography about drugs and guns and fast cars and maybe some baseball in the bargoon bin at IGA. Not much there that was that surprising other than Canseco's boasting about being the dude that changed ball and created the whole long ball era. He is also kind of a meathead (yeah?). The one surprising thing in the book was that he almost killed himself when his (ex-)wife was seeing someone else. How gay.

I also picked up Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco). The "smart" Da Vinci Code. I'm a hundred and fifty pages into it and I still don't know what the fuck is going on.

New Assbike

I finally put together the Tequila Sunrise Marinoni. I was almost dying without a good assbike to boot around town. I mostly used parts I had around, but I picked up rear wheel from Cavern Cycles (one of the best stores in my o), which was the biggest thing I needed. In total I spent $40 for the rear wheel, $25 for the Dura-Ace cog, $5 for the chain and $7 for chainring bolts. Everything else was from shid I had lying around.

I fixed the steerer tube with the wedge of a stem. I slowly tapped it in until the tube was round again.





Here it is the finished result :



Check out the Mavic pursuit bars :



and this is the seat I re-upholstered a whilie back:



I opted to go with no brakes, which is appropriately anti-social. With the bars so low it is also appropriatley inpractical. But riding it around feels totally badass. Tonight I decided to celebrate and go for an assbike bar hop and made a few stops.

Miami Vice

I caught the Miami Vice flick this weekend,. starring Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell and cars with big rims. Inevitably it blew. Unlike a lot of TV remakes (Starsky & Hutch, Charlie's Angels, Dukes of Hazzard) it was not a parody, but I think it should've made a reference to the look and feel of the original series.

It is also shot in grainy-ass digital video, so it looks like crap. What it was misiing was a) a plot that made sense -- the movie has a serious editing problem, as if a bunch of stuff was shot and then pieced together. There are some things that just don't make sense. It also needed b) a crazy over-the-top bad guy. Any stylish crime movie needs a ]villian that looks like a pimp or a pirate or something. I would've cast Prince in the role.

I have been watching the orig. series though, and that is still awesome.

BTW I caught this at Rainbow Cinemas - Market Square, in St. Lawrence Market. It is a discount theatre, but has new movies. Regular adult price is $7.50, about half of what the big playeurs charge.

Corporate Mofo

Okay, I finally decided that no matter what happens with my PhD I have to move on to the next step -- ie. get a job.

And it def. won't be a physics job. Academia is fine if you're a prof. But, fuckers who work their entire lives for $50k a year at universities making plots and coding up boolsha are fools. Real jobs will pay you way more to do the same shit and you get to wear a tie.

One thing I am worried about is having to work hard and/or long hours. Grad school makes you a lazy fuck, and I dread having to do shit like use Excel and fill out TPS reports.

I did google "quant sellout" and found this though: Leveraged Sellout.

And oh yeah. I never really want anything, but I love the colour of a silver Mercedes.

Riding Update

It's only been a week since I started with the intervals. The difference between racers and schmoes is intervals.

The workout goes like this. I ride out to the docks where there is a 6 km circuit. I ride the first half lap as if it's hard tempo, I settle into a good TT pace for the second lap and I ride at the limit on the last half lap. After that I am shattered and I ride around easy. Sometimes I recover a bit and do some hills in The Beaches, like this great 1.5 km climb I found.

Within a week I am feeling a surge of power and the arrogance that goes along with it. Awesome.