Did the two-nine thing.

Not for very long. I have long been curious as to what all the 29er fuss was all about and I finally went out and touched one in the flesh. What did I think? Meh. It was a Gary Fisher.... no. Wait. It was a "Trek"  Mamba The Gary Fisher brand has been reduced to a stencil of his initials some where on the frame. It's a sad day. I didn't like the blue and white color. The kid said that they had black. OK. I thought that the price marked on the bike was fair. I took it out for a spin. The first thing that I noticed was that it was BIG! Compared to the 26 inch MTBs that I have ridden over the last twenty years (poorly and infrequently: i still consider myself firmly a beginner) I though the the bike was too tall, the wheels took up to much space and that the bars were too wide. It handled slow. Even with the much-vaulted G2 Geometry it was a slow steering kind of thing. Maybe, for a 29er it was a scalple bit compared to a G2 26er... not so much. It was just plain slow. Push the pedals and... nothing. Now, I am certainly no racer but even to me it was plain that the 29er would take more to get going and stopping than a 26er. In fact, stopping kinda sucked. It sucked SO much that I asked the sales kid if the breaks were set up to be delivered or if they needed final adjustments. He assured me that they were ready to go. And they might have been, but they weren't ready to STOP! They were mechanical disks though, maybe that is a reason that they sucked more than rim breaks? It's funny though, because that was the one part of the experience that I had a pre-conception of superiority about. There definitely, definitely definitely DID find superior about the big-wheel. It went over obsticals that would have stopped the 26er dead in it's tracks, or at the very least required the use of "skill" to surmount. It was OK. I'm not sure that I would buy one over a 26er though. Bike for bike that cost more, weigh more and are less fun to ride. They do scale yellow curb stones better though!

Old Crow Medicine men. They COULD be The Wizard

Recently I have fallen in and out of love with a band. The Old Crow Medicine Show popped up on m radar just last week. The song Wagon Wheel is what actually did it. As I learned more about OCMS I wasn't surprised that I liked the song, only that it had  taken me so long to discover it and the band. I listened to a lot of OCMS on youtube and even learned how to play Wagon Wheel. I still like the song but the band...that's another story.

The premise of the band is that they are and "Old Tyme String Band". They leave you with the impression that they are a bunch of young musicians getting back to the folksy roots of the local music of where they are from. The image is that they struggled. They were, and are buskers. They "hoboed" around living on their ability to play music and surviving on their whits and having great adventures. Well, it seems that it's a thin shadow of truth built over a bull-work of lies.

You see, while some of the guys in the band DO have southern roots, they all started playing their "old time" instruments as a gag while they were attending their North Eastern Prep Schools. The band's front-man went to arguably the most prestegious prep school in the country.