After seeing more pictures from Johnson’s pen “camera” I’m not impressed. In fact I think that there is no difference between the pen camera and sketching the same picture using a paint program. In order to test this theory I will put it to you. Which of the following is the photograph and which one was done in the computer paint program? Hard to tell huh?

“Photograph” A

“Photograph” B

shouldnt everyone’s commute be this good?

i was riding home from school and decided to take a slight detour. i turned up some random gravel road that branches off from one of my normal routes. i dont normally randomly trespass, but i’m pretty sure it was school property, or hospital property, plus, the gate was open. so i climb this short road which leads to a big semi mowed grass field over looking Lemont. Here is that picture:

so i figured, there was one open gate, i bet there anouther, to kind of get off this hill. so i rode across this field for a while, found a closed but unlocked gate which seemed to grant me access down a long grassy slope, to the road below.

so there is the hill, and it looks pretty steep, and it was. i had to switch back down it. at the bottom i found anouther gate, opened it, and was back on the road. the next pic down is that road, which i think is pretty scenic and stuff.

i rode along the road, until i got to a grass trail, which follows a little stream back to the road my house is off of. that was an akward sentance but i am not going to fix it, no how. you cross a little covered bridge over the stream at the end of the trail, and that view from said bridge is below.

and lastly, my ride finishes by climbing a couple a few hills, via this road. its nice to live half way up a cool mtn. word. i basically just posted that to make all you city folk pissed off.

mel and i rode about 10 miles to a crappy breakfast place in centre hall. although breakfast was 6 dollars total for 2 coffees, eggs, hash browns, and toast, it was um, subpar. (better than say mick donalds though). Anyway, here are some pics from the roughly 20 mile round trip. Also, maybe some other pics.

In other news, who is coming to this ride? we set a date and everything. saturday the 19th of May. 50 miles. Fairly minimal climbing. food in the middle somewhere, in the form of a pb and j sandwich. beer and grilling and croquet afterwards. anyone who doesnt know this, can sleep on my floor or a couch or in my backyard, if you want more privacy or something. Let me know if you are down, as I need to make appropriate amount of spoke cards.

Prime candidate for a Brazilian butt lift.

What is the brazilian butt lift?

It is said that Jennifer Lopez has done for the rear end what Pamela Anderson has done for the front end. Over the last few years the buttocks and abdomen have received more press coverage than ever before.

The brazilian butt lift is not just about big butts!.

When Johnson told be about that one got fat video the email had targeted ads for fat injection surgery next to it. Having never heard of it I clicked the link. yum. Targeted advertising does work though, I’m lined up for a calf and testicle implants later this month.

By popular demand.

Jason left his DOPE cyclocross bike at the shop one day and Chris Jarcy and I made sure he would be safe for his next outing. It took him over an hour and a half to remove all the safety equipment we supplied him. He was pissed but I think it cured him of leaving his bike at the shop overnight.

Is it a coincidence that this man…

and this device…

were seen on the same property as over 50 bottles of alcohol….
could be a the start of a revolution…
or just a typical day at the Johnson compound?
You decide.
JINX

I’m pretty sure these guys don’t use B-17 Narrows…but I’d be willing to bet they ate the folks who ride the Kona Africa bikes. There are millions of photo captions I could think up for this one after several beers…I’ll let you all have at it with some of yours…
JINX

Literally. I’m back from Hawaii, it’s good to be back in America. Here are some pictures:

This is a picture from a beach that was covered in really smooth bits of glass.

We had to drive our pontiac rental car 5 miles down a really rutted out dirt road, after about 1/2 hour we made it to this awesome beach with these huge cliffs.

caca doo doo flavor, yum.

We had to deal with wild boars on a daily basis.

This is where the shot that scene from that movie about the pacific ocean. It’s the pacific ocean.

Here is the whole set for those who have some time to waste.

with your host: ‘its hight time for tea time, sucka, Johnson’

we rode bikes with tig welds. we didnt know what lugs were. we drank heavily and some of us tried really hard to contract diseases. we admired bike messenger style. (they actually didnt have any). we passed out on floors, and drunkenly grilled meat. we stuffed london broil cuts with bacon, and then wrapped it in bacon. ect.

anyway, back in the day we didnt know what blogs were, cause they werent invented yet. also, i forget what i was gunna say here. anyway we had a short lived web site called the richard gear. which was clever at the time. here’s some photos from those heady days! also some short fiction by mel and starmer, i think.

now for a previously (for good reason i bet) unpublished short story by mel, who by all accounts is much more normal now.

After the wall was destroyed
by: Melissa Ballew

After the wall was destroyed my parents decided it was safe to move to Germany. It had always been their life long dream to become Voodoo missionaries in a European country. We lived on Slovnoff St. next to a band of neo-nazi’s. They smoked crack from corn cob pipes and rolled joints out of the obituary section from old newspapers. They detested Voodoo and tried to gas on Hilter’s birthday(what? -Ed.). I don’t remember much at this age cause I was just knee high to an oriental, about five years then. I wore hand me downs from a girl down the street who was 13. Her old overalls hung on me like a saddle and dragged heavily on the ground. Kids used to call me viener meaner schnodle, which in German meant Voodoo chil’ Voodoo chil’. They made fun of our Voodoo practices, like the time I got a bat kidney in my stocking for Christmas. All the torment I received from my peers made me develop into a very hateful person. Needless to say I was very lonely on my tenth birthday. By age 14 I got new friends. They were rebellious like me. On the weekends we’d skin sheep and wear their hides around to scare tourists. Our plan backfired when one of the tourists thought we were a group of gypsies. There was even a story in the paper about how we were a wandering village that lived in grass huts and stayed warm in the winter by shared body heat and wool. The tourists eventually got showers too.
James flicks off the camera as he cleans the gin soaked puke off some endangered alpine moss. Welcome back to the continent Starmer!

our old logo. we dont have a logo now. we arnt effective at branding these days.

anouther nugget from mel: (relevantly funny passages highlighted for Starmer’s convenience.

Obesity in Ethiopia

Everyone knows about the cabbage and bean guy that was on the news a year ago. If you don’t here’s a refresher. He was a middle-aged man who lived in a log cabin by himself consuming solely beans and cabbage. He died in his sleep one night due to the deadly amount of carbon dioxide he emitted into the air. I think the news people were lying frankly. My impression is that this guy wasn’t technically alone, he was at one of those “Fat Camps” where they make fat people jump hurdles and eat high fiber foods all day. His drastic change in diet caused his gas to be more frequent. And do you know what they did with his dead body? Buried it, what a waste. It seems sad when there are starving people in this. They could have used him to feed all the malnourished third world countries instead. Imagine a world without hunger. Instead of care packages falling from the sky, decomposing bodies will bring an end to starvation. Ethiopians will poop and pee again, birds will sing and Colin Powell will become president. So keep biking, it keeps the pounds off. You don’t want to become someone’s first meal. You may think that this sounds like cannibalism but if you were hungry and Rosie O’donnel fell from the heavens to your doorstep, you’d eat her too.

i have alot more, but i think this will take up enough space as it is, for now.