There’s loads of people at work wearing a variety of charitable bracelets. You know the ones – Live Strong (yellow), Anti-Racism (black and white intertwined), Anti-Bullying (some other colour) and so on. Thats all well and good, but there’s something about the whole thing that doesn’t sit quite right with me.

The Live Strong ones were a good idea, but then umpteen other charities jumped on the bandwagon and they lost all of their meaning. Its become fashionable to get the latest Nike charity bracelet. In many ways that’s a good thing — after all, it means more income for the charities involved. On the flipside, I think the message has been lost somewhere along the way. There’s so many around now that nobody can remember what they’re all for.

Personally I prefer the alternative route: Get hold of a Live Wrong bracelet (cheers Rich) to antagonise the aforementioned colleagues, and make a donation to my charity of choice. Much more fun.

Lets see what google searches a post title like that brings in…

So, I arrive home on Thursday and go bike mad. There’s a vague plan to swap bits over from the DH to the XC bike, in order to create some sort of burly XC bike with gears and enourmous disc brakes. It comes grinding to a halt quite early on, when it becomes clear that an 203mm disc brake rotor blatantly doesn’t fit into the back of the Cove. In the end I settle for just sticking a spare disc brake on the front – I’ve had the bits lying around forever and just never got around to fitting them to the bike. Unfortunately, a quick test ride around the block reveals that it quite blatantly doesn’t work anymore. So I spend quite a lot of Friday morning bleeding it, which is always a fun operation. It seems to work now though, which is a bonus.

So why am I doing all of this? Its the inaugural [and ambiguously named] Cumfest this weekend! Friends, bikes and all manner of other things all weekend up at Andy & T’s house up in Garrigill, Cumbria.

Mike D spent most of Friday afternoon driving myself and Rich up there in his absurdly practical Peugeot Partner (holds three people, four bikes, all of our kit, some food, drink and a big box of choccy chip cookies easily) with Green Day, the Chilli Peppers and The Pixies blasting out of the stereo. We make it fine despite driving up through some full on millenium falcon style blizzards on the M6, and begin to party in earnest. It goes a bit wierd at one point when a somewhat inebriated Bez puts a beer bottle between his bumcheeks (probably best not to ask – mainly because none of us can remember bquite why he did it). Comedy injury of the weekend occured during the bicycle-pursuit races around the inside of the village hall. Rich managed to fall off of his bike and onto a radiator, puncturing one of his bumcheeks. There’s a slightly disturbing trend developing there isn’t there? I should probably point out that both incidents were entirely unrelated and even happened in separate buildings, but that might calm some of your fears so I don’t think I’ll bother.

Saturday brought one of the best bike rides I’ve had in a long long time. A group of about thirty of us headed out of Garrigill into the hills. The amount of bike porn on offer was silly – there were at least three pairs of the rare-as-hens-teeth Maverick SC32 forks and a mad variety of machinery going from Shaggy’s fixed-gear rigid Spot all the way through the spectrum to Lee’s Orange Patriot 7+.

Within half a mile we hit snow, but carried on regardless – we’re hardcore like that. About a mile into the ride we’re all walking through knee-deep snow and its snowing, hard. I’m wishing I’d brought the snowboard instead. Most of the group turn back at this point – bunch of jessies. However, about ten of us continue upwards and onwards – some have scampered off into the distance, leaving myself, Mike, Bez, Dr Gray and Grant in the chasing pack. We never did catch up, though we did discover that you could ride through quite a lot of the snow, and when you did fall off it didn’t hurt. This meant that riding back was one of the all time classic descents, with all five of us flying over the handlebars into snowdrifts countless times and laughing most of the way down.

We finally got back to Garrigill just in time for the pub to stop serving food, so Mike and Timmah went off to Alston and returned about a pint later with ten rounds of fish and chips! Rocktastic! Cue another evening of eating, drinking and being merry – this time largely without injury.

Saturday dawned bright and sunny. A small part of me wanted to go and go and attempt to climb that hill again, but it was outnumbered by the other 96% of me, which was only really up for being downright lazy. I settled for riding around the village on Mike’s Dialled Prince Albert. It was far too big for me (even though it was about half the size of Phil “Nightfire” Tonkin’s ludicrous Ferrous 29’er), but I loved the huge handlebars on it. About three feet wide with much the same rise on them. Meanwhile, Make, Bez, Drac and Timmah competed in the Tour de Garrigill -a five lap race around the village. At the end of each lap all of the competitors got pelted with snowballs. I think Tim lasted one lap, Lee did two, Bez managed three and Mike romped away to a crushing (if a little hollow) victory.

With the riding over it was time to pack most of our kit into the car (I seem to have left my shorts on the radiator in the village hall – D’OH!) and head for home (this time with a soundtrack from The Damned and The Beastie Boys). A fantastic weekend all in all.

Big big big ginourmous thanks to Andy and T for hosting it, Mike for the lift up there and back, Matt for being mum and cooking a couple of fantastic large-scale meals, and to everybody else for making it well worth making the trip up there. Roll on next time…

Oh, by the way, there’s some pictures out on t’internet, by Simon, Rich, Lee, Grant.

• One trip to Noah’s Ark.
• One Nitro Magnum .61 Snowboard
• Pair of Salomon SP3 Bindings
• Pair of Salomon Dialogue Boots
• One vastly reduced bank balance.
• We’re going in to the Alps in less then two weeks! Much wootage!!!

Going Native by Descent World

The long awaited new DVD from Descent World came through the door this morning. If you’re not into your bicycles and your dirt you’re not really going to be up for this, bus as you may well be aware I’m somewhat fanatical about the things.

I’m happy to say its a pretty good video. Not quite up to the high standards of Earthed or The Collective, but pretty damn good nonetheless. There’s a little too much dirt jumping in there for my liking, but that’s offset by some lovely footage from Fort William, Innerleithen, Dunkeld and various other tracks around Europe. Its always nice ace seeing the professionals blasting down tracks and being able to say “I’ve ridden that!” in a way that you really can’t with most of the videos coming from the States and Canada. The only real problem is that its not long enough.

Luxembourg by The Bluetones

A while back, The Bluetones had the audacity to release a new album without telling me! The bastards! Still, I got a copy of it eventually, and the early signs are that its a stormer. Its edged Evil Nine out of my work PC’s CD drive for now anyway.

Its a different sound to their previous outings, this time they’ve gone a bit rocky and electro. For me that’s a good thing – it seems to work well with their dependably great lyricism. I’m not going to say any more until I’ve had a chance to listen to it a bit more, but thus far I’m enjoying it.

Not just any old Arkanoid mind. I rediscovered the best version of them all: Megaball.

Way back in the day I got my very first computer. It was an Amiga A500Plus – and it was loaded! It had 2mb RAM, the ECS chipset, AmigaOS 2.1 and (get this) a 20mb SCSI hard drive. I even got a CD-ROM drive for it. Along with some random old dot matrix printer I had for it and a copy of Wordworth I could do all of my homework on it. Deluxe Paint 3, Brilliance 2.0 and Imagine let me paint and animate all sorts of crap. But that wasn’t what it was used for 95% of the time.

Oh no. You see once upon a time, I bought myself a copy of Amiga User International magazine. And on the coverdisc was an absolutely brilliant little game: Megaball by Al and Ed Mackey.

I must have devoted whole weeks of my life destroying my own high scores. It was absolutely addictive. My mother was partial to the odd go on it too – and the only game that had interested her at all before then was the classic Digger.

Fast forward to this evening, and I was feeling a bit nostalgic. I’d been reading some forums and came across a post saying that games these days don’t really push the hardware the way they did in the old days. After putting them to rights (Half Life 2? Not pushing the hardware? Ha!) I found myself looking back at all the old games I used to love. So I went searching for Megaball.

Well I never. Al Mackey has got a website, and you’ll never guess whats on there? Megaball 4! Yay! Woo! Houpla! Only one problem: I haven’t got an Amiga anymore, and I haven’t yet got around to installing WinUAE on this machine. Back to Google we go then…

Hooray!

What do I find next? A Windows tribute to the mighty MegaBall – DXBall. Its brilliant – not quite as good as the original, but still very playable and really really addictive. I seem to have been playing it for hours now. In fact, I’m going to pop back in for one last game…

I had a fantastic ride today, except for one little thing.

I was out on the Stiffee, blasting up and down the hills of Gloucestershire. I’d climbed the fireroads, descended on some ace singletrack, blatted down roads, got chased by dogs, moo-ed at some cows, got absolutely caked in mud and generally enjoyed myself. There was huge puddles, thick mud and even patches of snow here and then. I was informed by a walker that it was complete insanity to be out there in shorts, but I was fine all the time I was moving.

I was about two thirds of the way up the final climb when I started to notice the roots and rocks a lot more through the back of the bike. That can mean only one thing. Flat back tyre. Arse. This meant stopping in the biting wind to change it.

Typical. I got the old tube out and inflated it, only to find that there was no sign of a puncture. What’s more, there’s no sign of a thorn in the tyre – I’ll just have to risk putting the new tube straight in then. I just love punctures like that. I got one last week, and I pumped up the old tube when I got home to see if I could find the puncture. Its still up now.

By the time I was done I couldn’t feel my fingers and I was shivering like a good’un. I soon warmed up once I got going again though, and the new inner tube is a gert big DH one – so hopefully it’ll be a lot harder to puncture.

I really don’t get out and ride cross-country often enough. Its great – like a little adventure every time I go out. I always forget just how much fun it is going out in horrible conditions, so when I get up in the morning (or more likely, the afternoon) I can’t bring myself to get out there unless its sunny. But going out today in the wind and rain was ace! What’s more it seemed like I was the only rider out there. I descended a trail, and then rode back up it a couple of hours later – and the only tyre marks I saw were my own.

I got back and got in the shower and got that mad “I-was-cold-just-now-and-now-i’m-boiling” tingly itching thing all over. Bweeeuurrrh.

A while back I bought Adam Freeland’s album and visited the record label website on a whim. There I discovered Evil Nine, a couple of breakbeat djs who were working on an album. Unfortunately, the record label went bankrupt (apparently through no fault of their own).

Then a while back, Marine Parade records popped back up onto the scene – complete with Evil Nine and their fantastic single Crooked. The album “You Can Be Special Too” seemed to be available but I couldn’t find it and I forgot about it for a while. A couple of weeks ago I spotted it on Amazon, and ordered it.

I can’t be bothered to write a review – there’s plenty of others being complimentary about it (AllMusicGuide, PlayLouder, HKClubbing, InTheMix) and others who aren’t (TheScene.com.au).

Suffice it to say that I’ve been listening to it pretty much ever since. The new Chemical Brothers album that I bought at the same time hasn’t even been played all the way through yet!

« Loud Rumbling Noise »

I can see the dust cloud he’s kicking up behind him as he motors across the desert. He’s not seen me yet either. God knows how he’s missed me, I’m in a huge BMP – 2 Battle Tank! Maybe he’s ignoring me in the hope that I won’t unleash my mightly machine gun of fury upon him?

Sod that, I’ve got a missile launcher on here too! Right, trace him across the desert, put the crosshair right in front of his tank, right-click…

« SSCCCHHHHRRRREEEEAAAAAOOOWWWW … BOOMF!!! »

DIRECT HIT! Ace! How satisfying is that!?

Ooops, there’s a helicopter. Oh crap, its one of theirs and they’ve spotted me. Best try to do something about it then. Crosshair, angle up…

« WHOKKAWHOKKAWHOKKAWHOKKA … AKAKAKAKAK …. AKAKAKAKAK … SSCCCHHHHRRRREEEEAAAAAOOOWWWW … BOOMF!!! »

OOOH YESS! HAVE SOME OF THAT! I am on fire!

Oh crap, there’s another one! Oh crappety crap crap, Brett’s flying it. I’m a dead man.

« AKAKAK AKAKAKAKAKAK AKAKAK … BOOMCHUNKA!!! »

BBBEEEAAATTTCCHHH! Damn it, come on respawn, respawn. I’m gonna take you down!!!