Assbike Fashion

Time for some assbike fashion for the holiday season.



First off there was the Terrorist Scarf

Everyone's like "Blahblabla...it's a keffiyeh and it symbolizes ...yaddayadda", yeah yeah whaddever, it makes you look like a hepcat revolutionary.

And then there was the Castro hat and the ensuing kerfluffle : CBC shilling Fidel Castro cap online. So they re-named it a Ranger hat on their website



wear it like a stigma.



So what will be the next politically inspired fashion item ? Will it be the Moshe Dayan eyepatch ?



Or maybe the look that was all the rage from the streets of Tehran to the campus of Columbia a crisp and spartan Ahmedinejad Jacket.



I've had mine since the 80s -- a look so earnest and oblivious not even the most calculating 2007 hipster can touch it.



Is Mosa Zi Zemmori a hot new electrodance outfit ? the favorite for the Turner prize ? No he is was of the many resident s of Guantanamo Bay who owned a Casio F-91W.

That's right -- owning one can be given as a reason for being housed in a Cuban prison camp.

That's right there's a terrorist watch and is everything you would hope for and more. Clunky, plain -- vaguely Soviet, easily incorporated into IEDs.

And there you have it, assbike fashion tips for yr asses.

Swiss ... keepin' out the Chocolate

I'm sure I'm not the only one that noticed the similarity between this (controversial) ad by the "Swiss People's Party" (which runs won on the platform of "gettin' rid of the darkies") and this old Minor Threat ablum cover



which I always liked because the black sheep is like "No Way!" and runs away.

Free Dirt on my Street

The park in front of my house is a center of weirdass neighborhood activity. Last week trucks dumped off a ton of mulch and Saturday moning was the mulch spreading party. I got the notice for that.



Today a truck dumped a heap of dirt and all afternoon people have been coming with buckets and tubs and cars loading up on dirt. How do they know there is dirt for the taking ? Is it even for the taking ? Are they just stealing dirt ?

Maybe I just missed the notice.

Tangerine Machine

A couple days ago I got a chance to test out this beast.

It's a pedal powered HPV that's sold by Blue Velo. It's got a 14 speed gearbox, lights and mirrors. All that's pretty heavy at coming in at 80 pounds, but I got the feeling that once you got it up to speed you could really roll.

Everything feels faster when you're so low to the ground and can't see around cars. Bombing down a hill would be terrifying in this.





At $13,000 I was afraid go all out, because I almost hit a tree in the first few minutes since steering and braking aren't second nature since it doesn't drive like a bike or car.

It drives like a Green Machine :



...except the two wheels are at the front instead off at the back.



But if you're starved for attention, that would be $13,000 well spent. When this rolls down the road children scream and women swoon.

Snow Day

I love riding out in the snow, and amazingly a fixie rides really well in the snow; probably because the rear wheel won't skid -- unless you do it deliberately.

The city made a skating rink in the park across the street, which is nice, because the indoor rink across from my place is always booked for hockey. They spent the whole day before the snowstorm clearing it off, and now it's buried under a foot of snow.



The stretch of Bloor between about Christie and Dundas west or so (where the Value Village is) has such a different feel than the rest of the city. It feels like I'm in Brooklyn or something. Here be some pics:











I also discovered "mall shopping", hitting up Dufferin mall. I found a store called H+M that has stylin' clothes, and they're not too pricey and lots of wigger shops. I bought an Adidas tracksuit top which has the inadvertent effect of making me look like part of an 80s breakdancing crew.

...oh and there's Greta and me enjoying the snow :

More new pics

Over the top Christmas decorations continue. One of my neighbors put up this MASSIVE sno-globe.



It's fan-powered. Inside it the snowmen on the merry-go-round actually go around ! It's on Palmerston north of Bloor, if you want to go eyeball it in person while it's still there.

Also, I'm practicing close up pictures. This is a new TTC token :



Not great, but the best of like a dozen tries.

New Photos

January - High of 9 degrees and no rain or snow. Yeehah, the Inconvenient Truth --> some convenient weather for biking around.



This one's from visualresistance.org :



... and I found these ones of flickr. Everything about this picture is perfect.



bikes outside a bar in NYC :








Someone gave us chocolates, and this one had math on it. Integratin' by parts ! It even looks like it's done on LaTeX.






Windows XP is so cool and businesslike, but search for something; it fires up the searchdog. The little dog that scrathes it's head and flips through a book while you wait.



..and here's my latest photo technique, collage. Greta eating chips.

The Best of .... 1990 ?

This is that time of year when everyone lists their top songs and music of the year.

That's all cool and all, but I came acros spiritofradio.ca, a CFNY fan page and lists ther year end charts going back to 1978. One the right there is the top 90 from 1990, the year of Madchester - funky basslines and pulsing organs. And those long forgotten names! Electronic ! Sugarcubes ! Bootsauce !

Here's the five Madchester tunes from the way back machine.

Stone Roses - Fool's Gold (9:55)

Happy Mondays - Step On (5:17)

Charlatans UK - The Only One I Know (3:56)

Soup Dragons - I'm Free (3:23)

Inspiral Carpets - Commercial Rain (4:40)


PS. That pic at the top is a close up of this house I spotted on one of my night rides. THe lat few years everyone seems to trying to out do each other on the Halloween and Christmas decorations.

Hairspray on Dupont

There's a lot of filming going on in Toronto now. I saw a big set up near high park and Bloor St. at Dundas west was closed during rush hour yesterday for a big shoot.




On Dupont they are shooting the John Waters musical Hairspray (starring John Travolta, Queen Latifah and Christopher Walken), and they've turned two blocks of Dupont (from Bathurst to Spadina) into 1950s Baltimore:

Whddup

I saw this sign on the ground on my way home today. Found art ! Profound!

Last night I decided to go for an Assbike ride around town and check out a few places.



No better way to chill out than a death defying ride through the darkness on a bike with no brakes.

I am missing my stolen Pinnarello tho'. It was fast and easy to ride.

I saw some fixies outside the Rhino bar in Parkdale where some messenger-types were drinking and became jealous and have started making plans to replace the Pinn with a another snappy fixed gear bike.

On the way home I spotted my friend Kalen's bike outside Grossman's and stopped to have a drink with him. This on the left is the city's most disgusting vending machine -- in the can at Grossman's -- I think I caught a disease just looking at it.

For today's dose of cuteness here's Greta with her arms around Isbel :



And here's today's Assbike Song. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion -- Flavor :::

Tues.

This morning when I was leaving my place I heard these cries, I freaked a little, because it sounded like a baby or something. I found this little guy in our backyard -- all scrawy and dirty and crying or something. I wasn't really sure what to do. I gave it half a can of tuna and he gobbled it down. I don't think it's a stray since was pretty friendly and wasn't afraid of me.



It ran off, after the meal, but I'm pretty sure it's someone's lost kitten. I posted it on craigslist, but I wasn't sure what else to do.



I don't usually bitch about the conditions for bike riders, since I ride wherever I want and scoff at the Highway Traffic Act anyways, but this is the bike lane on Davenport. The shoulder and bike lane are totally occupied by these trailers and the bike lanes are plyoned off.

What remains of the lane is too narrow for a car to pass a bike. So if you ride along Davenport east of Avenue Rd. you have to ride right in the lane and put up with honking drivers or getting buzzed every 20 seconds.

You would never see a situation where a driver was put into a position that was as dangerous or inconvenient. Riding on the sidewalk is the only safe solution for a lotr of riders in this case. So much for Bike Week.

Oh yeah, the pic at the top of this post is the Queen St. Home for the Terminally Hip, right in hipster hollow, across from the Drake.

Snow Day

Snow day in tha T-dot. Here's the view from Assbike Headquarters:



But there's a lot happeing in the Assbike workshop. The Porn Shop hybrid has been torn down :



The operation was relatively painless as the seatpost and stem slid out fine. There's one screw still stuck in the chainstay bridge and the crank BB might be an ordeal.

Right now the build options I'm entertaining are 1) fixed gear 2) single speed and 3) multigear. Probably down the road I'll build a rear wheel on a cassette hub and go 9spd, but a single or fixed might be the intermediate stage.