A Shot In the Dark

Jenny Craig ain't got shit on BMX. Around here it's all weight loss, all the time.

Lighter forks.

Lighter cranks.

Like my man Charles Oakley once said, "if it ain't broke, break it." Or at least triple-butt and flute it and drill it out. (What caliber are those cranks, anyway?)

At least the crank update makes sense. Profile cranks have been more or less the same since Eric Rupe was running a JESUS LIVES number plate, and people have been running hollow spindles for years. But the forks? Ain't gonna lie, they scare me. Sub two-pound forks and sub four-pound frames strike me as taking unnecessary risks for minimal gain. I guess that's an arbitrary number, and maybe these forks will be as safe as houses. Maybe two years from now one-pound forks will be the norm, and these will seem laughably heavy.

But somehow I doubt it.

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Incientally, if you're looking for the ultimate modern BMX bike, Raleigh's got you covered. Fat tires, tiny seat, no drivetrain, full aluminum construction. All for under $200!

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Dah Shop 1 Year Anniversary

SUNDAY! Surviving one year in NYC is like surviving 100 years anywhere else. Congrats to Dah Shop—come out and celebrate with 'em. Details below.

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The Nose Knows

My mind (not to mention stomach) are destroyed following the down-to-the-wire Bulls loss to the Celtics tonight (fuck you, Sher!), so I'm just going to go ahead and re-post this mind-blowing video of the most ridiculous nosewheelie ever. From Woozy (appropriately enough). I couldn't nosewheelie this far if I was on the moon and someone was holding up my rear wheel.

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Also, Standard Byke Co would like you to know that whatever those other companies can do for you custom-wise, they've been doing it longer. I'll take a translucent green OG STA, please.

And Now For Something Completely Not Different

Sometimes I think BMX is stuck in a rut. And it's times like that when I take a look at BMXfeed and realize that, yep, I'm totally right.

1) Hey, another new frontload stem. Ramp up the yawn. I'm a little disappointed that the first question wasn't "So how does it feel to be the 347th company to 'design' a frontload stem?" or "Did you consider just producing stickers to stick on someone else's frontload stem?" or "When can we expect the check for this blatant advertorial?"

2) Hey, another bike check. I'm way more excited by the helmet.

3) Hey, new SNAFU products. If color is an innovation, McGoo is a genius.

4) Hey, some old guy bitching about nothing. What a loser.

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Steve Crandall Has A Pos(seatpost)

As a fellow old guy, I can definitely identify with Steve Crandall's freshly built Exodus. There's the brake (which I haven't adopted yet), the super-fat front tire, and the exposed seatpost. (Just out of curiosity, I wonder what the average age of the Macneil 330 buyer is?) I was going to say the big bars too, but while big bars do seem to be favored by the over-30 set, they're also the bar of choice for 60-pound 12-year olds. Actually, the younger/smaller the rider, the BIGGER the bars, if anything. I'm still waiting for a company to produce a small run of 10x35" bars and immediately sell out of them.

In totally unrelated news, I've been unloading a mess of my vintage BMX goods, and I was sort of worried—what with the economy collapsing and all—that prices would start to drop. A year or two back, I sold a near-perfect Hutch Pro stem for somewhere around $300. Sold another one in an auction that ended yesterday. I guess I had nothing to worry about.

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Best short video ever? A warning against running 36s? Fifteen seconds of wheel-destroying wonderfulness from Dave Young circa '96-97, as found on Metal.

Can You Dig It?

So it appears that the new Max Gaertig/Mike Brennan signature We The People frame is, if not out, at least in the enormous paws of Herr Gaertig himself:


(Just how big is Max's bike? That small blur you see just to the back of his front pedal is actually a Volkswagen Tiguan.)

If you'll look carefully, you'll see one major difference in the production model from the CAD drawings (or whatever they were) that WTP posted way back in September:


Yes, ladies and germs, The Warrior (not to be confused with The Ultimate Warrior) appears to have an actual seatpost clamp. And while it's of the integrated variety, at least it does allow those riders not swayed by the idea of a wedge post to run Max and Mike's frame. One small step for man, one huge leap for seatpost kind.

(And if Max's bike isn't big enough for you, there's always the redesigned Macneil Deuce Deuce. I keep hoping for an Ice Cube-endorsed Deuce Trey, but I guess it's not happening.)

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Please Stand By

Whoops. I won't get into the whole lengthy absence thing again—you can just refer to the last post for that.

I will say this, though: my trusty old iBook G4 flamed out for good last week (logic board failure, or so they say), so I'm on a brand-new computer—a basic aluminum Macbook—for the first time in forever. Seeing that I hadn't had to buy a computer since 1989 or so, I figured I got off somewhat easy. Of course I hadn't backed anything up in forever either, so I'm in limbo as to whether ANY of my data can be saved. It wasn't the hard drive itself that burned out, thankfully, but from what the Geniuses at the Apple Store had to say, transferring everything off won't be an easy task. So I'm holding my breath.

What else? The economy still sucks. And nobody's safe. Not sure whether you saw it or not, but Rick Moliterno is selling off a bunch of his stuff on eBay, including his original RAD script, a shitload of original Shimano DX pedals and a grab bag of half-finished Standard prototype stuff. At least they're not selling the disco records they used to put together the Style Cats soundtrack. Or Kerry Gatt himself.

Not yet, anyway.

Meanwhile, it's business as usual, and I have every intention of throwing myself back in the mix before I get kicked off of BMXfeed due to inactivity. The new computer will help, because, the old one? Sixty percent of the time it worked, every time.

In the meantime, ESPN's got this BMX thing on lock anyway.

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