Happy Halloween everybody!

My grandma went to the big annual farm show this month and won first prize in a raffle. It was a week's vacation in Hawaii. She turned it down, and requested second prize instead, a $100 savings bond. "I've already been to Hawaii," she said to my dad's protestations, "and besides, I'm 84, too old to go tromping off to an island."

"Yeah," replied my father, "but you accepted a savings bond that won't mature for 30 years."

Friday was the Halloween Critical Mass ride, and I worked all week to get Count Chopula ready for it. I never thought it would work, but it did... I just wish I could find some photos of it. I forgot to take any of my own. I dressed in a tux, nearest thing I had to a burial suit, and rode it for the first time in its finished form on the ride.

Al the Pal came as "Road Rage", a traditional CM costume. The bike, "Car", had a huge muffler on the back (in which smoke bombs were set off), an actual car grill on the front, hubcaps on the wheel, and a working car horn. Then he dressed in a fat suit with a Bears sweatshirt, crazy grey hair, and a red face... and screamed into a cell phone while honking at other riders.

My favorite costume was a dog dressed as a carrot. There's a picture of it and Road Rage here.

I also liked the folks who got radiation suits from American Science & Surplus and drew "Springfield Nuclear Plant" on the back. Other notable costumes included several riders dressed as the CTA, a headless rider, a wheelman, Svengoolie, a traffic cone, a computer, and rock-paper-scissors. At one point some guy in an SUV tried to plow through a crowd of us, NYC publicist's daughter style. Where's Winshield Wallace when you need him? (A guy who once stomped through the windshield of a driver who ran over his bike trailer).

Headed to the after-party, where Bob had soaked the labels off some beer and made up "18th Precinct Beer", the notorious police district where they arrested bicyclists on an early CM ride. "Ride a bike, go to jail" they said.

From there headed to yet another party, this one of a guy I hadn't seen in five years, Gricus. On the way a cop called me a "fuckin moron" for "taking up the entire road" (riding in the right lane of a four-lane road). It was good to see Gricus again and all the art he was into, he'd been getting into video lately and was (supposedly) doing something for the member of Poi Dog Pondering who lived upstairs (always take with a grain of salt anything said by a guy with a scratched mirrored coffee table, hehe). But he seemed to be doing well.

One of the attendees had a great costume. He rigged something like a backpack frame under his trench coat so that it was constantly holding a boombox above his head. He was Dobler from Say Anything! Another guy was dressed in a dog-suit, only his face showing, and he had a "red rocket". Absolutely disgusting.

There was a DJ, and he drew the attention of the cops, but they were reasonable guys. "If we come back, the party's over" they said. They came back.

Saturday, KC was in town so we went over to Monkey Boy's to fire up for this huge party they wanted to go to. First we went shopping for a costume. MB and Ruggs got bandito costumes, which went well with my cowboy outfit. KC was Forrest Gump, right down to the haircut. Now that's commitment! 3-Kidney Spahr bought three costumes- Tomb Raider, sexy vampire, and milk-carton-head. Singular was Wednesday Addams which made me drool. We played shot roulette (spin the spinner, and do the shot- all of which are smooth flavored vodka except for one "bullet", usually tequila) and 3-Kidney got too drunk to make it to the party! Jeez, you'd think that extra kidney would let you drink like a fratboy. MB actually had to carry her home from the quickly-departed El.

So we went to another party, as 3-K was our connection to the big'un. Your basic drunken revelry. What can I write? You know how it goes. The next day I didn't feel too bad, just enough to justify hitting the make-your-own Bloody Mary bar at Ranali's. We found it hilarious that KC cut his hair like Forrest Gump and didn't even make it to the party he did it for. Plus, 3-K had spent probably a good $100 on the three costumes, hehe. Oh well. The season is not yet over.

There needs to be a word- I'll be the Germans have one- for that mixture of shame and pride you feel when you hear an obscure band you love in the background of a commercial for a really stupid product.

Check out pics of the last Rat Ride at chicagofreakbike.

An update from the Rat Patrol UK:

Many thanks for the info re swing bikes. The Knee Trembler works and sure is suitably named. The looks you get from the squares are so funny, as you suddenly go into sideways mode. For about ten seconds she felt like a real killer then became fairly normal. Then 1 minute later I fell off in front of a bus queue, but hey best do that kind of thing in public. At work I was called a genius by one guy and an idiot by the others, they just dont seem to understand. One comment was 'are you trying to be eccentric'. 'That is something that one does not need to try' was the crushing reply.

I was going to use a scrapper that I found in a hedge but the seat tube was fucked, so in a fit of inspiration I chopped my old Kona, aaaagh. My first decent bike hacked up by some low life chopping scum.Ha. But in hindsight it belonged my exmate Bob who ripped me off for some money ages ago so what turns around comes around (or something).

The only problems with The KneeTrembler is that it is easy to clip the front wheel with your feet but I am getting used to this. Construction is brazed using an old fork and head tube of the scrapper I found. I will get you better photos if the sun ever comes out again. A lovely bike to ride, many many thanks for the inspiration. What next?

I saw Jiang Zemin today.

Illegal Art

The Evolution Control Committee has begun to offer mp3s of Rocked By Rape on their website! The song was released in 1999 but was a hard-to-find single until they put it online. Click on the link to read the whole sordid tale of CBS's ire and then download at the bottom, but the gist is that it's Dan Rather rapping to "Back in Black" thanks to the miracle of sampling. Even if you're not a big fan of Negativlandesque copyright violation, it's definitely worth a listen.

A sneak-preview of Count Chopula.

My parents bought me a ticket to Boston for my birthday. Arrived and immediately ate some chowdah and baked beans. Sectionchild came over to my friends' house and we got drunk and talked about RP geekery. The next day was the first geniune nor'easter of the season but we ventured out into it anyway. Managed to ride three different types of rail-based mass transit, but didn't make it on a ferry, unfortunately. We made it to Wellesley and got the tour, our hostess even missed West Wing to accomodate us. Went to a comedy show in the student union's pub. Drank some Green Dragon. Pulled a drunk driver out of her flipped SUV. Went for some fresh seafood the next day, had raw oysters. Took a walk around the reservoir. Sectionchild came over for some more boozing and a game of "Grass", a 70s weed-dealing card game. Sometime during the night her car got towed, which sucked mightily. She managed to get rescued no thanks to us. Flew home the next day and met with my parents, who took us to a cajun restaurant where I ate way too much hot stuff. My sister slept over and we talked about college life, which she is just beginning. Her roommate tried to kill herself by slitting her wrists with scissors in front of her roommates but was restrained. Kept waking up that night with my insides burning from all the habaneros I'd eaten. Hung around with the rents the next day, making plans to try and make it to either Alabama or my brother's gig for Xmas. My brother is currently at a base camp by a lake formed when deadfall from St. Helens dammed a river. They're fixing up the trails the volcanologists use to get to the mountain, and he wakes up each day from a camp facing the crater and works for 10 hours before fishing for his dinner- he's incredulous that they are paying him to be in such heaven.

Went to some friends' house for the first time, and discovered that they were... I dunno what you'd call 'em, hardware hackers? They had a black box on the wall that allowed them to get free pay-per-view. They had a mod chip in their Playstation 1 that injected boot information into the load sequence of any CD you put in there, allowing you to play games that you've copied with a CD-R, of which he had hundreds. For the Playstation 2, their mod chip worked a little differently- it fooled the PS2 into thinking you never opened the lid, so you can boot a regular game, then swap it with one of your bootleg games. Even their fridge had some sort of computer interface, I can't imagine what for. They also had an impressive collection of city parking meters.

Bubbly Dynamics, part II

The building sits just a few blocks away from Bubbly Creek, in the heart of Chicago's famous slaughterhouse district, though these days it's mostly manufacturing and the only reminder of its former glory is the occasional open-topped truck full of entrails jiggling past. It was pretty much a rectangle, three floors and a basement, in the concrete-squares-filled-in-with-bricks style that most warehouses in Chicago are built in. It was built in 1910, and served as a paint and varnish warehouse until the 50s, when a meat-packing company bought it to use as storage for something besides meat. They added a larger freight elevator and a railroad siding, which tacked some odd lumps on to the side of the rectangle. This period in the building’s history is unclear, some say there was a conveyor system in there at one point, and a room full of old wooden soda crates would hint that it held carbonated beverages sometime in its life. But ten or fifteen years ago, it became Scooter World.

Scooter World was a scooter graveyard, where you could go and dig around for parts. To this day various motorcycle parts litter both the inside and out. City code allows a single “family” to live in an industrial building as caretakers, and the residents during this period were Santa Claus and Cowboy. Santa was so-named for reasons that become obvious the minute you see him, and Cowboy, I presumed, was called that because he loved his guns.

Scooter World was also used as a place to hold raves, as various graffiti saying dumb things like “420” can attest. Cowboy’s other hobbies included breaking into surrounding warehouses, fighting, and shooting out every window in the building. This he did an impressively thorough job of, making sure to put a bullet hole in even the smallest and most out-of-place windows. Say what you want about the fella but you gotta admire his dedication to perfection. His other hobbies got him into trouble eventually, and at one point (possibly during an aforementioned rave) he pronged a guy in the face with the butt of his rifle, knocked him off the loading dock, and received a life sentence for it (it was unlikely that this was his first encounter with the law).

Scooter World was already going under, and with all the utility bills being ignored the residents had resorted to powering everything by propane. Towards the end some crackheads had taken up residence in a derelict semi-trailer behind the building, occasionally using the building itself as well. They’re nice crackheads, though, always willing to do odd jobs for Santa for a few bucks.

Three months or so ago, the building was sold to Bubbly Dynamics, a Delaware LLC corporation. The owner of the building had been afraid to enter it after Cowboy (who was squatting) put a knife to his neck. So once Cowboy was safely socked away in jail, the owner (frustrated by the presence of all those motorcycles) looped a chain through the frames of a few hundred motorcycles and then to his truck, which he drove off in, dragging the contents of the warehouse right out the door. Health and Human Services was called to ask the crackheads to leave. Other tales were also told to the new owner, tales of wild parties and EPA cleanups and the body buried in the back yard. In fact, everything here is hearsay, and second-hand at that, so forgive any errors I might make in my attempt to record it all here in my journal.

Just north of the new headquarters of Bubbly Dynamics is the Schulze & Burch Biscuit Company, makers of Toast-ems and every other “toaster pastry” that’s not a Pop Tart- such as store-brands (Aldi’s, Jewel, Kroger’s, whatever). I can only assume that inside is a gigantic toaster where they toast a tremendous toaster pastry and cut it into the smaller ones.

The proximity of the Toast-ems factory means that when the wind is blowing south, the air smells like Pop-Tarts (my favorite is when they’re making the strawberry ones). When it blows from the east the smell is of pizza, from the southeast cooking meat, and from the southwest molten steel. It’s the only place I’ve ever been where you can tell the direction the wind is blowing by smell.

What do you think?

Is this this scary site a parody or not? Some of it seems obviously so, but some of it, I dunno...

Saturday I ventured along with Singular, Monkey Boy, 3-Kidney Spahr, Kabuto, and E-D to an arcade game auction. Monkey Boy wants to turn his living room into a bar, much to 3-Kidney's chagrin. I wasn't there to buy anything, having learned my lesson about the inconvenience of arcade cabinets already. In fact, I'm trying to convince M.B. to take my Klax game, as it just doesn't go with our new place.

The games are all unlocked for inspection by would-be buyers, but an experienced one would bring their own extension cord. Once you get juice to a machine, though, you can play it all you want for free. I found a bunch of old-school games I used to play and discovered that they suck. Remember the Superman game, the one where player 2 is the red Superman? All that game consists of is kicking and punching. You just hold the joystick left and whenever a baddie gets near you, hit one of the buttons. I used to think that was fun! I used to pay hard-earned allowance money for it! But to maximize your auction experience you gotta go for the big quarter-sucking games, like sitdowns and four-player adventure games. This auction had 500 games but I'd say 70% of them weren't working and there were no sit-down ones. Pretty lame as far as auctions go, but heck, it was free. A full game of NBA jam costs $4 so if you look at it that way we were rakin' it in.

Monkey Boy was there for a Ms. Pac Man, which is considered a collector's item and therefore costs real dough (since you can get a crappy game for a few Jacksons). They musta had 10 copies of it (not to mention the old-school Pac-Man where he looks more like a sperm on the cabinet art, Super Pac Man, and Baby Pac Man), the working ones going for around $400 (much cheaper than ebay, though). M.B. found a sit-down cabinet in perfect condition... and couldn't get it to work. Oh, well, the best way to look at an auction is that if you don't buy anything, you come out ahead.

Later on I headed to the Rat Patrol Build Day, arriving on the embryonic form of Count Chopula. There were probably 20 people in attendance, but most of them were experienced Rats who were just there to lend a hand. The fella hosting it, Josh, had three types of welders but only activated one at a time, I dunno if they are unsafe to operate together or both of the fellas who could weld preferred the arc or what. It's very hard to have a chop session where you get to ride your creation at the end, but I managed it by coming with a solid plan in mind. It was a simple matter of grinding the parts I want to attach to fit the existing frame, grinding off the paint around the weld, and taking off any nearby meltable parts (which included the grease in the bottom bracket, lest it cook stenchily in the heat of the weld). Then I handed it over to Josh and John to slap it together.

Contrary to my example, not every Rat is a weirdo dork. Many of them really have their shit together, and have worked hard on the skills that allow you to build a bike. Josh had an aluminum diamond frame that he had built from scratch in 300 hours. Talk about precise work! They're pretty nice, too, pretty tolerant of the random dorks that have joined up and just do this as a hobby. Very willing to teach what they know to the amateur.

Chopper Bob was working on a sort of tall chopper, and Al the Pal had a beach cruiser he was chopping but was so overwhelmed by the ideas folks gave him that he went right back to the drawing board for more consideration. I think he and I are at the same stage, where we've built sloppy trashbikes and desire something a little more rideable. Rideability was definitely my goal, and the two impediments on a chopper are the reduced leg extension and the fact that you no longer rest your weight on your knees but right on your buttbone. So all I have to do to make the Count good for longer rides (like a whole Critical Mass where my body isn't crying out for mercy) is find a comfy seat and somehow extend the crankset further. The latter was accomplished but as always, pictures would explain it better than I ever could. I will post anything I get from the Rat Ride, Build Day, or of the Crimebike and Hammer to the ChicagoFreakBike page.

Gotta get the Count ready for the Halloween CM ride, as well as start on my costume. Time for another trip to the fabric store.

Bubbly Dynamics, Part I

Chicago is well-known and appreciated for its architecture, but less so for its engineering. For example, this city has far more moving bridges than any other. Another amazing aspect of the city is the water system and the river, the lore of which are well-known by residents but not by non-residents, other than the fact that the Pipefitter's Union dyes it green on St. Patty's Day (leading to the joke "well then why can't they dye it BLUE the rest of the year?!?!"). Part of that lore is the tale of Bubbly Creek, possibly the second-most-famous polluted river in America.

As the swampy mouth of the Chicago river slowly grew into a city, the growth of the human population brought with it a nasty problem: Call it pollution, call it human waste, but what we're really talkin about here is poo juice. The poo juice from the people all went into the river, and the river went into the lake, and the lake is where the drinking water comes from, and nobody with the exception of a few sick individuals on the Internet wants to drink poo juice. An estimated 80,000 people died in the 1800s, though, from exactly that.

So they built a big pier out into the water to suck fresh(er) water into a reservoir for drinking. It wasn't long enough, and it tended to suck up fish, and people complained about bathing in chowder, which I would gladly suffer if it meant somehow that I could avoid drinking jus du poo. But it didn't, so they built some longer pipes, and it was a little better, but a cool glass of ice water still had that distinct tangy aftertaste. So they undertook Amazing Engineering Feat #1, they built a crib (basically a house with a drain in the middle), floated it two miles out, filled it with bricks until it hit the bottom, and then hired the Irish to dig a tunnel under the lake floor two miles back to a pumping station on shore. It was the longest tunnel ever bored at the time. Nowadays there are several cribs out there, you can see little houses out in the water, and before the advent of the outboard motor men would row out there and live for a week at a time on the crib (it had living facilities and may just be the world's first "crib") and keep gunk out of the drain, including busting up any ice that would form in the winter. Now, in The Wake Of September Eleventh(tm), those cribs are patrolled by the Coast Guard and anyone who gets too close in a boat is blasted out of the water like the muthafuckin Spanish Armada.

But, whenever it rained a lot, the poo juice would even reach the cribs, and though mama said it wouldn't hurt, you shouldn't have it for dessert. Now, humans, when confronted with the shitting of their own nest, rarely consider options such as reducing the number of humans or figuring out something to do with our post-sausage, so to speak. Instead, we think, "how can we alter nature in a way that will still allow us to shit our nest and get away with it until it's our children's problem and not ours?" So in 1900 they accomplished Amazing Engineering Feat #2, they reversed the flow of the Chicago River so that the poo juice would flow inland! They dug the Chicago Shipping and Sanitary Canal connecting the Chicago to the Des Plaines, and there was a great sound of squealing brakes as the river turned around and flowed in the other direction, draining the lake into the Des Plaines and down through the Mississippi and out to the Gulf of Mexico. The poo juice was out of Crook County and therefore out of mind. Eventually, the river drained so much of Lake Michigan that the Great Lake states sued to reduce the amount of diversion, because other lakefront cities were finding their lake slowly sneaking away from their shoreline. The Supreme Court decided that Chicago had to put the brakes on the amount of water being drained, so they cut it back with the lock system.

There was another problem. Even with all this crazy engineering, the river just didn't dump the poo juice into the canal fast enough. The solution was Amazing Engineering Feat #3, where they dug another river, 200 ft below the existing one! Being engineers, they creatively named it the Deep Tunnel. I would have at least called it the Lower Chicago, if not the Massive Subterranean Poo-Juice Shunt.

Alas, poo juice was not the only nasty thing lurking in the river. This is where Bubbly Creek comes in. Chicago is famous for da Blues, da Bears, da Cubbies, and park sassidge. And, although the home of Vienna Sausages ensures that a healthy amount of killing-floor sweepings still makes it into a processed meat tube, there were still plenty of unwanted hog parts lying around, and without any Pennsylvanians in town to use it in scrapple, it got dumped into Bubbly Creek. So much so that the constant decay caused the creek to churn like the Bog of Eternal Stench, and nearby residents prayed for flatulence to improve the smell in the air. Passing by Bubbly Creek might require you to grab the nearest cat and hold its butt to your face, inhaling deeply, just to endure the noxious fumes.

Plus, every other industry was sloughing their deadly waste products into the creek, like so many drunken Cubs fans lined up at a trough-style urinal. At one point, the pollution caused the river to crust over, and chickens were seen walking around on it. This was no doubt misinterpreted by other chickens as a sign that the chicken messiah had arrived, eventually causing chickens to rustle up large messes of their offspring on Sunday mornings down at the chicken church. If only someone had taken a hint from the Cuyahoga and set the river aflame, the river could have provided an endless supply of river-fried chicken. Fortunately, unlike in Cleveland, the creek never caught fire, and as the slaughterhouses moved on, the creek stopped being so choked with rotting pork (the other rotting white meat) and nowadays is only polluted by heavy metals and nasty chlorinated organics from the industries. Unfortunately, unlike Cleveland, the mayor did not catch fire, so the river is also clogged with the bodies of dead Republicans who dared to run against da Machine.

Nowadays there are efforts to clean up the rivers before the only thing that can live in them are throngs of snakeheads. Also, the city has a huge water treatment plant smack-dab in the middle of the lakefront disguised as a tourist attraction. So as I draw a glass of icewater from my tap, I can be confident that- thanks to some amazing engineering- it came to me through two miles of Irish-dug tunnels and was filtered very close to an Imax theater and a Forrest-Gump-themed restaurant, and not from a chicken-dotted seething trough of pork and a split-level river. I can take a swig and say, "Ahhh, that's good lake water, and not a hint of poo."

Another Rat Ride, which I will post to the new bike page when the pics come in. Waiting for us in the alleys were two drum heads, an opossum, a complete tent, a Dell PC, a pair of shark jaws, a cell phone, a pair of cowboy boots, unopened rolls of xmas paper, and a knockoff Razor scooter called a "Racer" (very clever).

We ended the evening behind the Odwalla distributor, where they had put out crate after crate of their bizarre and expensive beverages that were about four days from expiring. I think Superfood is made of people. IT'S PEEEEEOOOOOPPPPLLLLLEEEEE!!!!!

One of the Rats is doing a film on garbage. We got to talking for the camera about how our society is so wasteful that someone can live off the waste, and how class affects garbage: In upperclass neighborhoods, the buildings are built so that garbage is not accessable, and if you get too lowerclass people just don't throw things out- they use it up, wear it out, make it do, and do without, as my mom always says. So in order to find the really good stuff you gotta find that middle ground. Of course, the Rats are only interested in found items for our vehicles, such as the big pair of shark jaws, which will end up on the front of one of my bikes. We never touch the set-asides, which are useful items that caring homeowners leave out of the garbage for the less fortunate. Last Thanksgiving I even saw a complete turkey dinner set out by the dumpster in little plastic containers. And the homeless folks we meet have always been really nice. I guess even in the midst of all that wastefulness there are still things to make you feel good about society.

So a mob of kids killed a guy, after he punched one of them because they threw an egg at him. The kids ranged from 10 to 18. They beat him with rakes, bats, folding chairs, and just about everything else they could find.

Dumbass.

Kids throw shit at me all the time. Most any neighborhood that has kids, has unattended kids. Many parents sit out on the porch and watch 'em but there are still roving gangs of little punks everywhere who, in order to impress the other snot-and-koolaid-mustached little punks, think it's funny to fling rocks and bottles at passing bicyclists. It doesn't just happen to me. The only reason I've escaped without stitches is that punkass little kids tend to have bad aim. They haven't learned to lead a target yet, like the Jonesboro grade-school killers had been taught to do. So what do I do when somebody throws shit at me? I get the hell out of there!

The logistics of taking on 16 people in a fight aside, what adult hasn't learned that if you fight with a minor, you get in a heap of trouble? I thought every man was taken aside at 18 and told, "listen, if you kick some kid's ass, no matter how much he deserves it, you will go to jail. From now on, you're a man, and you fight other men." Why, there were kids at my high school who had young adults just itching to beat their ass as soon as they turned 18. But the victim made his dumbass mistake #1 by deciding to fight with kids.

His second mistake was forgetting that all kids possess both the desire and the ability to kill. Think I'm wrong, and your little sweetheart is a darling angel? Watch what they do with bugs and frogs and anything else they can find. They kill them, in as many creative ways as possible. I once saw a group of kids come across a luna moth, as big as a handspan. They gasped in awe at its beauty and size. Then one of them stepped on it. Bugs usually get dismembered or suffocated. Larger creatures usually die from anal fireworks detonation. Ever seen a bunch of kids dunk a cat in gasoline and let it go and light the trail? Kids are evil, through and through, because "civilization" is nothing but the foreknowledge of consequence.

The only reason that more kids aren't murderers is that when they're little, they usually don't have the means to kill (unless they have access to guns) and once they get older, most of them figure out the consequences of killing somebody and reluctantly stifle their desire until one day somebody pushes them over the edge. Unless they're too poor to care, or too rich to be held accountable. Just look at Michael Skakel. A teenage Kennedy, American royalty, he beat a girl to death with a golf club (how fitting) because he knew he could get away with it- and he did. Why, he's not even the only KENNEDY to kill!

Of course, this poor fella didn't deserve to die for being stupid. Nobody does. But he had pride, cocky male arrogant pride, and that was his downfall. When I took Taekwondo, the first lesson they taught us was to run the fuck away whenever anybody wants to hurt you. It's served me well many a time. Think I'm a wuss? Well, I'm a living wuss. An old fella once told me why he stopped barfighting- because he realized that dying with a broken bottle in your gut on a nasty tavern floor is a stupid, stupid way to die.

And so is being beat to death with a folding chair by 10-year-olds because you couldn't just let it go when one of them threw an egg at you.