"This gave me cancer" is currently the top comment on youtube for this video, and I think that just about sums it up. Probably the most awkward, uncomfortable thing I've seen in 2013 so far, and as bad as the main singer "Trailboss" is, guest star moto badass Blake Wharton was even worse. Oh my goodness it was horrible. Orphans died and angels lost their wings when this movie was made.
For one thing, Blake has no idea how to open his mouth. If I didn't know the words to a song and mumbled along trying to mouth the lyrics, it would still look more believable than Blake's attempt at singing. Let's review Blake:
I... I can't figure it out. Race videos made in the year 2012 with no slow mo, no interviews, and gorilla gripping camera-work trackside with fast pans? Who are you?
The music's a love/hate "I didn't have to pay royalties on this" affair, and maybe the imitation 8mm clips are a little over the top, but who cares? I'll take one minute and two seconds of "Creative Minds" over an hour of "Distinction Productions" any day. Basically it's the closest thing to Saint Rankin we have right now, and it's pretty good. Or as anonymous said in the comments, "Slap on some Brit music from the 70's/80's, call it Earthed 6." Which reminds me: who is still posting as anonymous? Seriously.
Speaking of Saint Rankin, he is still the best thing you pitiful humans have ever made in your short, underwhelming existence:
Big days in a persons life: high school graduation, college graduation, first pair of five tens, getting married, first kid, getting tweeted by Alex Rankin.
Saint Rankin, you are third at the top of the DO NOT KILL LIST, right after Todd Olson and the guy who invented Zebra Cakes:
Most people who read THE BOT don't know our third member, THE BAARON, but he holds a significant amount of sway in all things robot. When we consulted with BAARONBOT about which humans should not be killed he was quite emphatic about Zebra Cake guy. Whether it's Shimano shifters or Little Debbie snack cakes, robots know quality when they see it.
This isn't in response to anything recent. I was just rereading this old article/interview with Zach Jarrett @ BLM (the guy in charge of the legal and federally funded awesomeness that is Sandy Ridge) that addressed the closure of the Marmot Dam downhill trails (which were sweet and close in to town). What stands out above everything else in the interviews, in the photos, and in my memory, is that the trail and its presence in the area was nbd until people started building wooden shit.
Don't build wooden shit.
One more time: don't build wooden shit.
"What?" you ask. Oh, allow me to repeat myself: Don't build wooden shit.
At the time that I'm writing this, there are 24 comments on the KHS @ Bootleg article on PB, and 30% of those comments were put up by user khsfactoryracing.
You know what's super cool? Leaving tons of comments on your own article.
Why do you even have a number on your back? There are only a few numbers worth having on your back: your UCI ranking from last year, 69, 420, and maybe 3 if you're doin' it for Dale.
[Editor's note: It's just been brought to my attention that #789 is in fact Logan's UCI ranking from last year.]
Scientists at Minneapolis’ Orfield Labs created their own soundless room, an anechoic chamber. Their studies have found that when putting subjects within the chamber, they begin to hallucinate within 30 minutes. With an average quiet room having a sound level of 30 decibels, the anechoic chamber’s sound level is -9 decibels. The ceiling, floor, and walls of the chamber absorb sound rather than have it bounce off as normal objects do. The chamber is so quiet that the subjects can even hear their own organs functioning. Although extremely interesting, the experience is rather unpleasant. Not one subject has spent more than 45 minutes in the chamber alone. Leaving a person to only their thoughts, the chamber could drive them insane.
Proving once and for all, definitively, that humans are total pussies. "Oh, I can't be alone with my thoughts. It's so hard having to think about what I've done. Distract me so I can feel good about myself again." ROBOTS say kill yourself.
Glad you took your video down, and cheers to Vital for taking it off the site. Nonetheless, let's walk through why that video sucked.
Maybe this guy had no idea who built these trails or how much work it was, but here's a quick hint: whether you know the trail builder or the history of the trails or not, chainsawing the entire circumference of the top of a loose berm with your rear wheel typically is pretty bad form. Doing it on video and showing it off to the whole world as if you deserve a pat on the back: KILL LIST.
That's a great screen grab. Glad I got it before the video went down.
Here's another hint: if there are a million tire tracks, and all those other riders managed to ride the loose, sandy berms without chainsawing the top foot off, maybe you also shouldn't chainsaw the top foot off.
You can buy $160 neon shorts and do failed dogpiss nac nacs, but you're not Cam Zink. Cam Zink can go through a berm without coming to a complete stop. You suck at cornering.
Hey, remember twenty years ago when there was no shuttleable downhill trail in Bend and you worked with the BLM for like ten years to build one and get it legitimized? Yeah, me neither.
This is a tribute to you, dudebro:
Hard.
MTB legend and all around good guy apologizing for your actions after hosting you at his house. Solid.
Two more idea's from Sneeky Pete, or as I like to call him Superfan. Pete posts about three times more comments than our second place insecure friend internet commenter who lives out his frustrating, failed life vicariously on our site, Bob:
Seriously Pete, if commenting on TEAM ROBOT was cool, then you're Miles Davis. Thanks.
Yeah, it's beer sombrero, or a Sombeero as I like to call it. That's thanks to Kyle at Chris King, who I still haven't returned the Sombeero to.
Pete, I like where your heads at, but we're probably not going to print any t-shirts that say "FUCK YOU" in giant block letters on the front. While those two words are essentially the TEAM ROBOT mission statement, we try to use a more subtle, nuanced dance of language and wit to communicate the point.
Beacon Hill race next weekend. Don't worry racers, you won't have to think too hard when you get there. The kiddos are already out there sorting the dialed lines.
I like that it was instantaneous. Like, as soon as he dumped the bike his shirt was coming off. Not weird at all.
But then he got stuck in that weird in-between space after he ripped the front, when all his friends were hugging and high-fiving, and he was stoked to land a double front flip, and stoked to have all his friends there, but still definitely wanted to get that shirt off. Bro to the rescue to help him get that shirt off. Nothing gay about that sentence.
Thus begins the TEAM ROBOT t-shirt design contest. If you have a t-shirt idea, post in the comments, and we might make it a reality. Probably not, though.
Send in your best design/graphic/drawing/scratching/finger painting and you could win!
Winner gets a five pack of our choice and one of our old wolf/laser-eyes t-shirts, in size medium.
This post and the last one are straight stolen from Vital, btw. But if you add commentary it's called "content creation" instead of "content aggregation" or what I like to call "stealing."
I'm guessing Evan Turpen crashed and he isn't too stoked on his run, but I'm guessing he's pretty stoekd for his team this year. I hear he gets along really well with his new team manager:
Check the photo to see the @EvanTurpen @Teamrumors new sponsor.
3. Chaz got hired to write for Pinkbike. Does not compute. Apparently they read this shitty blog enough and then thought "hey, we should have this guy make our successful website less appealing to average Joe's." Look for my first article to drop on Thursday, and look for a bunch of thirteen year olds and forty year old weekend warriors to get pissed when they read it.
Tray racks or a pickup truck. That's pretty much it for good bike rack ideas, and yet there's no end to the constant onslaught of bad rack ideas that keep coming out. It's like chain lube: there are a million of them, but only a few don't suck. Here's the newest brilliant idea: it's like a north shore rack with AIDS.
AND IT'S ON A PICKUP. AUTOMATIC KILL LIST NOMINATION.
And don't say I can't make AIDS jokes. Have you seen Magic lately? He looks great.
So maybe this rack isn't like AIDS at all. Cause Magic looks better and better every year, but that rack is gonna be wobbly as shit and creakier than visorless guy's bike at the races after a few weeks of shuttling.
I've finished lots of races in last, but instead of turning it into some heartwarming story I mostly just complained about my tires or how I didn't get enough practice.
"When we last shared news about theTimberline Mountain Bike Park in November of 2012, the US Forest Service had approved a permit for the project and things were set to move forward. That permit was issued after an environmental analysis from the USFS lead to a "Finding of no significant impact" from the trails, roads and other development required to build a "world class" lift-assisted mountain bike riding area on Mt. Hood.
But after that permit was issued, two appeals were filed against the project. One came from a individual citizen and the other was a joint appeal from several outdoor and environmental groups including Friends of Mt. Hood, Bark, Mazamas, Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs, Northwest Environmental Defense Center, and Oregon Chapter of the Sierra Club.
Now — as Timberline Mountain Bike Park officials prep to begin construction this summer — some of those same groups are seeking a legal injunction against the project."
So Timberline bike park might actually happen. It looks like it's going through. Sweet. In other good news, Kyle over at Chris King let me know that Sandy Ridge is in the running to receive huge funding to build an actual downhill trail. Not another "Enduro" trail, a real downhill one. Legally. With federal dollars. If that didn't instantly explode your puny human brain, follow this link to vote for Sandy Ridge:
http://www.facebook.com/BellBikeHelmets/app_228716427271717 I watched the links for all the other trail systems and they sucked, so Sandy is the clear pick. I figure we've got this one in the bag. Hopefully "downhill specific" will mean less of these sad, sad switchbacks that have become synonymous with Sandy Ridge:
"I specialize in doing near-impossible tech stuff like fakie hucks and backward manuals, but I'm still totally surprised and pissed at the world when I can't land stuff the first time."
If you're not Sean Burns and you think your emo whining intro is going to get you any pity, you're blowing it. If you're Sean Burns you can do whatever you want.
Ditto if you're Brian Yeagle. He can yell as much as he wants in his video parts, because Anthem II was amazing and because I regularly enforce double standards on TEAM ROBOT.
Living in Portland, I've hated this mason jar bullshit for as long as it's been around. Once I saw this, I knew the robot apocalypse couldn't come soon enough:
MASON JARS WITH SALAD IN THEM. BECAUSE REUSING TUPPERWARE IS SO HARD.
No, not the shock, although I'm sure that it's MIND BLOWING and EARTH SHATTERING in it's EXTREME NEWOSITY AND TOTALLY SUPERIORNESS, just like every other new product that gets released by every other company.
What's amazing is their marketing strategy:
"This new shock represents a big improvement over the old one, but the old shock was so good we're confident that 97% of riders won't be able to notice the difference."
Okay, fair enough. It's a bold claim, but I suppose it's possible. For example, can 97% of riders really tell the difference between 3C and super tacky? Probably not. Of course, you can't prove any of that. Who knows how many people can actually differentiate between tacky tire compounds or rear coil shocks with negative springs? It's anyone's guess, so if I said 36% and you said 3%, we'd both be equally supported in our claims.
The only way we could settle our dispute would be to take a representative, random sample of 200 or so riders from all ages, skill levels and riding styles, and see if they could tell the difference. Of course, they would HAVE to take the shock and ride it for the sample to be relevant, and they would HAVE to ride the old shock, too, so they could assess the difference. Without doing that, it's all just guessing, and I wouldn't invest too much based on those questionable numbers. It would make about as much sense to base a sales strategy on that guess as it would to invest in U.S. housing in 2007 because "everyone says it's so hot right now."
"So we're only selling the shock to UCI registered pro riders. If you're not on this list of UCI pros, you can't get the shock because you won't even be able to tell the difference."
Oh... bold move.
I guess my biggest question isn't the even the 3% number. I've never ridden the new shock or the old one, and these guys designed it and test rode it a million times, so this time I'm going to go ahead and give them the benefit of the doubt. My question is directed at their breakdown of who can tell the difference between the two shocks. I've prepared these two graphics to illustrate their theory:
Have you ever met a pro racer? I have, and I can tell you that pro racers break down pretty neatly into these two categories:
Super naturally talented riders who could ride a tricycle down the hill faster than you, but have no idea what their bike is doing, couldn't tell you what "tire pressure" means, and sure as hell couldn't tell you what all those blue and red knobs on your fork do:
I like to call these riders "race winners," and they probably couldn't tell the difference between the new vivid and loaf of day-old bread wedged in their linkage.
The other pros are the sorta/kinda talented riders that work really hard to overcome the deficit. It doesn't work, so these riders always get beat by the naturally talented riders by like 10 seconds every time. Desperate to escape the downward spiral of depression and unrealized dreams, these less-talented riders focus obsessively on their bike setup and try to justify and rationalize their getting repeated losses by saying "I just need to dial in my bike a little better" when in fact it's just that you suck:
So yeah, these riders might be able to tell the difference.
If you can't tell the difference between these two graphs you're not pro.
I didn't even write this to talk shit. Really. It's just a fascinating marketing strategy, and I've never seen anything like it. And like I said, I have no idea how the new shock rides. For all I know, it could be the sweetest thing ever. Of course as a Fox athlete I'm supposed to say that the our products are 32% stiffer and 59% more awesome, so there's that, too.
I guess I'm struggling to communicate what I want to say, so I'll let Pepper Brooks take it from here:
"It's a bold move, Cotton. Let's see how it plays out for them."
