Old Dirt TV

Worth it just for the first 30 seconds with Fairclough. Incredible riding.

The awkward, 2 minute long Sam Hill interview at the end? Not so much.

Monday

Jon Wilson

If you know Wilson, no explanation required. Found this picture on Casey Coffman's facebook. Yeah, okay, maybe facebook is alright.




Picture of Wilson.
Editor's note: this photo is a pan, he's not actually going that fast. He's really old.





In other news:

I'm going to be representing Lewis and Clark College at the Collegiate National Champs in Angel Fire, New Mexico next weekend. So, that's pretty sick. My buddy Chris from school will be coming along to "document" (that's a fancy industry word for take photos) the trip.


Here's a photo of Chris getting sick with it in Greece last year.


Chris and I will be picking up team member #3, the Baaron Nachtrab, in Ogden, Utah. We'll also be picking up his noble steed.



I'll be racing dual slalom on a Tonic Fab Howie RT. Should be sweet. Nice low BB, a long Chaz-sized toptube, and a slightly longer rear end should rip the slalom track apart.

Dual slalom and downhill? Game on. Here's the head cam for the course, same one used at the Red Bull Final Descent race they just held. And yeah, there will be snow on the ground next weekend. Only the strong will survive.





Here's my basic game plan for the downhill and dual slalom:

Boom

Worst music choice ever/Ukraine

Worst music choice ever? I've heard some bad ones in my day, this one is a world beater. I can only assume the person who "made" this video is from the Ukraine. Mind you, this is just an assumption, but they see things differently over there:




I had to look up what Ukraine even looks like. I think it's next to Turkmenistan or something.

Profiles in TEAM ROBOT: two more people from the kill list

If you haven't seen this video yet, it's really good. Watch and listen for when he mentions "Sustainable stars."


Also, just an important side note: if Team Robot has not explicitly stated that you are on the do not kill list, then you are on the kill list.

Racing

Australia: home of power wheelies

I haven't seen a junior with such a rad riding style since Lewis Buchanan. Wild, fast, and loose. Best Rennie-style power wheelie (ever?) at 3:04. Straight up Rennie:



Just be sure to turn off the piano electronica techno in the video and turn on some real music instead:

Stuff

Best Cry ever+CSI Miami=genius

Vegetarians

Pictured above: Typical Lewis and Clark College student, and my typical reaction to typical Lewis and Clark College students.




This is 100% stolen from the best page in the universe. I cannot claim to have written all of this; I can only claim to have thought 95% of it while attending school at Lewis and Clark College.

"Here's a simple test to find out whether or not you're an asshole:



If you answered "NO," you are an asshole.

Not eating a piece of meat on your plate that you didn't order makes you a full-time asshole because you're effectively saying "yeah, I know it's too late to do anything about it, but I'm still going to let this animal's life die in vain." Not eating a steak that someone brought to you by accident won't bring the animal back to life, won't reduce the demand for meat and it won't make any difference to the meat industry's bottom line.

I was in a restaurant the other day when some solid-gold bitch sent her dish back because her seafood pasta had seafood in it. First of all, if you order a meat dish and then ask them to hold the meat, you're a jackass. Food is seasoned based on all of the ingredients, including the flavors the meat adds to the dish. So seafood pasta without the seafood tastes like bullshit. You're just eating a steamy coil of soggy pasta. BARF! Of course, when the dish came out with seafood, she made a big song and dance about how she's a vegetarian, making sure everyone within an earshot knew she was better than them. Then she made them take it back and make her another dish. Good call, turbo-bitch! Way to stand up for what you believe in. The world is better off because you sent back that dish. Fewer animals are now dead because you refused to eat those shrimp, right?

In fact, it doesn't violate any moral code to eat meat that other people ordered either, and it makes you look like a prick if you let other people's meat go to waste. If your friends order nachos and there's meat on it, not eating it makes you a pious dipshit. Do you think it makes any difference whether or not you put a piece of meat in your mouth that someone else ordered and killed anyway? As long as you didn't order it and had no intention to, eating meat isn't contradictory to your moral stance.



Vegetarians are, in general, negative people. They always assume the worst in humanity and animals alike. Who's to say that animals wouldn't gladly sacrifice themselves for our meals if they knew how happy it made us? After all, most vegetarians argue against speciesism, or the belief that we are different than animals. If that's the case, then shouldn't it stand that a certain percentage of animals would gladly sacrifice themselves for the greater good, like humans who volunteer for military service do? I know it's a little bit different because we don't eat our service men and women, but I've met a lot of troops and I know that most of them would not object to being eaten.

I eat animals because I love animals. I love everything about them. The way they taste, the way they smell when they're grilled. Even the way they look at me on my plate, all sizzly and saucy-eyed. Every time I see bacon, I feel like the pig fairy has visited me with a gift. A gift that is sliced from her back, smoked and cured with honey. It's like Mardi Gras in my mouth, with less puke.

But there's a good reason to eat animals if you love them: to bring them off the endangered species list. Thanks to our modern agrarian society, the once-endangered buffalo has made a comeback from a population dwindling in the thousands to no longer being on the list. If it weren't for people eating them, their population would have never made a comeback. That may seem counter-intuitive, but when there's a demand for a type of meat like buffalo, that demand is filled by enterprising young farmers who breed buffalo just for that reason. Since buffalo is some of the leanest meat you can buy, it's in high demand, and they're raised in larger quantities to put into my mouth.

Now I know that the anti-speciesist crowd argues that it's better for animals to not exist if their existence is filled with suffering. But rarely do these people ever stop to ask the question: why?

Why is all suffering bad?

I suffer every day. Sometimes out of boredom. After all, every single person who rots in a cubicle for 10 hours a day is suffering. The only difference between that type of suffering and an animal's, is that humans volunteer to suffer through things like work, school and marriage. That's because we know that with the exception of marriage, suffering sometimes has rewards. In fact, even animals choose to suffer sometimes: they give birth. If all you dipshits who have such a problem with suffering really believed what you said, you'd stop having children, find the nearest cop and ask him to shoot you in the face. That's the only sure way to end suffering.

But I don't think all suffering is bad, so long as you learn from it. If I were unfortunate enough to be a parent and saw my child about to put his hand on a hot stove, I'd sure as shit let him. Burning yourself on a stove is a great way to learn to not touch a hot stove ever again. Any parent who doesn't let his or her child burn him or herself should have their children taken away for abuse. Not letting your kids suffer is one of the most serious forms of neglect today.

The type of suffering animals endure is also different from the type humans endure because animals are dumb. They keep no record of their suffering. There's no collective memory of their agony, and why should there be? Does it matter? Does an animals suffering make any difference in this world? I'm not suggesting we pointlessly make animals suffer, but if they do in our pursuit for some greater good, like chili, will anything change by going out of our way to not make animals suffer? If you buy free-range eggs, do you really ever know for sure that animal who bore your eggs didn't suffer? Or are you just buying into a story to make yourself feel better? And how can you be sure that animal didn't suffer some form of mental anguish that you can't determine by visual inspection? If animals are the same as humans, then shouldn't it stand that just as many animals suffer from some form of autism, retardation or psychological disorder as humans do?

Buying cage-free or free-range eggs means you feel guilty about something, and you're too lazy to actually do something about it, like raising your own chickens to make sure they're properly cared for both physically and psychologically. Free-range eggs simply make you feel less guilty without actually having to exert any effort or be uncomfortable in any way. And that makes you morally dubious at best, and definitely not better than anyone who doesn't buy into your narrative or world view.

And while you're at it, if you don't eat someone's leftovers because it has meat in it, that makes you a bad person. When you choose to make a showy stand by not eating meat, even when your consumption makes absolutely no difference in the number animals killed, what you are saying is that your desire to be perceived as morally superior to your peers outweighs your actual goal of being morally superior.




Get over yourselves. Stop defining yourselves by your diet. You aren't what you don't eat."

-From someone smarter than me

29ers are gay

As usual the guys at Eddy Merkin nailed it. And by "guys at Eddy Merkin," I really mean Verg, because he's the only one that ever posts. And I quote,

"Animals hate 29ers too. Proof that 29ers are gay:

"

End quote. Genius.

the UCI World Cup is old news

Mountain bikes are for pussies. Water buffaloes are the future.

Water Buffaloes+Rob Warner commentating=way better than UCI

WE HATE YOUR FACE

Whaaaaa?!

Mike "Hucker" Clark's Hang 5 to Front Flip during the 2011 Vital BMX Game of BIKE - More BMX Videos

Email hacked by Israel

If you got a spam email from me today, I'm sorry. It won't happen again, unless it does.



The above picture shows what it looks like when somebody hacks your email. It's interesting that I successfully logged in from Lake Oswego one hour, and someone logged in from Israel the next, and yahoo had no reservations about this activity. No security questions, no nothing. Gmail here I come.

Also, this incident marks my first personal interaction with Israel. Israel, I had no beef with you, but you definitely went down a few notches today. I don't blame you exclusively, but consider yourself on notice.



Also, if you think this is some sort of pro or anti-Israel political joke, you're dumb. I'm really just upset some jerk hacked my email, and I'm willing to blame the first person or nation available.

Trails/Graves/dialed bike setup

I've already posted this helmet cam with Nico Vink of some trails in Belgium:

Nico Vink Helmet Cam from GroundedBMX on Vimeo.

Bob sent me this video of those same trails. Pretty ridiculous.

Deluxe bmx/Vans benelux: Sven Grieten from Sven Grieten on Vimeo.

Graves and Bryn circa 2002, pre-Mad Catz. I think Graves was on an Orange?

Given the fact that Sam Hill was sporting a green MONSTER ENERGY!! mohawk at Worlds, we can conclude that "style" is maybe lagging a decade or so down South in Australia. Is this mullet ironic, or is Graves dead serious? We may never know.





Last but not least, dialed bike setup 101. it's amazing to me that, after all the janky things I did to my bikes, I never tried this. Bravo, sir. Bravo.




-Chaz

Fat Bald Men

FBM continues to be my favorite bmx company check out this sweet vid from interbike showcasing all of the new inovative product for 2012





and this one has everything good in it well if we could get some boobs in there then it would be perfect.

Gypsy Caravan 3 from FBM BMX on Vimeo.

Deity Components: Definitely not on the Kill List

Team Robot's old friends Eric and Sadie at Deity Components are having a sweet trail photo contest to give away a new Cryptkeeper on their Facebook page. Be sure to check out their page and their photo album to see all the other sweet trail shots.

Like my photo or leave comments if you think Tex's photo is awesome. If you don't think it's awesome, no one likes you anyway.



http://www.facebook.com/pages/deity-components/378143935788#!/photo.php?fbid=2551669789795&set=o.378143935788&type=3&theater




In other news, this post represents the first link to Facebook on TEAMROBOT ever. A wise man once told me, "you've got to sell out to eat out." I'm taking that maxim and running with it. Expect Team Robot's members to be commentating at the X-Games or Fuel TV or selling household wares on infomercials or starring in "Paul Blart: Mall Cop." Or all the above. As soon as possible.

Sweet

This one comes in from Bob. Click the link to have your mind blown:

http://i.imgur.com/nr0Ab.gif

Close, but not quite

I saw this instructional helmet image floating around the internet.



Of course, the picture is a little funny. But tragically, it misses a huge opportunity to teach an important lesson about proper helmet use to the youth. I adapted the image to demonstrate this lesson:

Don't use a helmet. Team Robot hates you and all your humans friends.






Also, Chris finally got back to me about that Kovarik post I did:

Your face

-Chaz

Best comment on Team Robot ever

(In response to the Gwin/Vories interview post)

1 comments:

WOW said...

you should officially shut down your blog it sucks now
September 29, 2011 1:59 PM

METAL MONDAY

FUCK your FACE.



-Patrick

the New school sucks.

I found this on VITALMTB.com pretty sick........

Mike Montgomery Riding Mammoth Bike Park (on a Specialized) - More Mountain Bike Videos

warning i am going to complain about this video.... mike is super talented and a crazy slopestyle rider and he crushes in this video. Mammoth mountain is a huge part of down hill history and mountain bike history in general and has been the proving ground for some of the best racers of all time so thats cool and i totally respect the history and heritage but i am a snob and a grump and i like what i like and i dont like to ride wooden jumps and concrete pavers on my mountain bike i'm sorry but look at all those paved "bike park" turns that sort of sucks, granted the soil at mammoth is super dusty and almost impossible to build berms into but at 45 seconds and 1 minute 55 seconds mike is basically riding on the road that just doesn't seem appealing to me. maybe i am spoiled but riding on dirt is the whole point right? In the northwest sure it rains a ton but our dirt is the best hands down our trails a super sweet and super fun. i think trail builders need to chill out and stop trying to make everything look like wistler. its just not always justified to "armor up" a trail am i alone in thinking that we are loosing to much natural terrain in favor of man made features.
i understand that the soil sucks at mammoth and all those armored corners are warranted especially due to the high level of taffic that place sees but it still bums me out especially when it becomes trendy to put pavers on trails that don't need it i think we should rebel against this trend i mean so what if a berm gets a big old crater in it just harden the fuck up and smash through it, trust me its fun to monstertruck some shit.
basically i am grumpy and think things were better in the old days.check out this vid see told you so way sweeter.

in short dont suck. kick ass.



PFUNK