PPTTHHFFFFFSSSSSTTTTTT!!

Is the sound of my mouthful of tea being spat all over my monitor when I saw this on the Messenger Mailing List.
Thanks Kimberly.


Louis Vuitton "re-imagining" the Bike Messenger. It's a pretty big step.

MORE GOD HATES TYRES PHOTOS

These ones are from Justa Kapusta:



FULL SET HERE

THE PISTETTE HAS DONE AN ART

The Pistette and some of her Royal College of Arty mates are having an exhibition at Ada Street Gallery in fashionable Hackney starting tomorrow at 6pm until the 19th.
I'm not sure how relevant it is to post it on here but some of her stuff is a bit bikey.



If things keep up the way they are, chances are The Pistette will be leaving the HOP nest soon but I'm not that worried about being left alone because there's other HOP members who are going nowhere fast.

SUMMERTIME ROLLS

This heatwave we're having just now has forced us to change the HOP office hours to 4pm-11pm in order to accommodate all the lying around in sun we've been doing. It seems to be working 'cos there has been stuff produced over the last few days, most recently these Mark Skulls designed tees for Scott Grobag's cross town BMX race 'Bricks to Brix':



Instead of trying to write something that would expose my complete lack of knowledge about this event here's my only BMX experience:

I was once cycling around the fantastic town of Glasgow, Scotland with my friend Al who was a fairly big, fairly tough ( not tough in a starting trouble sort of way but in a don't take any shit from anyone kind of way ) guy. He happened to be riding his BMX and as we passed a busy bus stop a tiny wee girl of about five years of age skipped out of the shelter a little way onto the road. When she saw us she stopped dead in her tracks and started pointing and laughing and slapping her knees with that exaggerated hilarity only small children and Pantomime Dames can get away with. " Hey Dad! " she called over her shoulder " Look at that big man on a baby's bike! " then continued to point a laugh, almost resorting to rolling around on the floor. I wasn't sure what was going to happen next, it felt like I was watching a baby monkey running up and slapping a lion in the face. I was concerned that if her dad made his presence known amongst the crowd he might get battered by default but fortunately he never showed his face and Al just kept on riding, silently with his face turning a bit pink until ( much further down the road ) we were out of earshot of her cackling.
It's something we've never really talked about since.

This probably won't happen to people doing Brick-to-Brix because Londoners don't seem to have the same habit of being cheeky to random passers by that Glaswegians do, which was something I really enjoyed when I first moved down here but now I'm beginning to miss being told I look like a Ball-Bag by people I've never met before.
Anyway here's the details:

GOD HATES TYRES PICS

These shots of the top three guys in the Skidtles capture the commitment required to do well. In the three times we've run this event it's been won by A Courier, A bmxer and A Bmxing Courier, I think it has something to do with regarding your bike as a tool rather than a possession then just going for it with out worrying about paintjobs, skin, your hair, clothing etc...




These first two are from Fred at Creative Exposures

This one is by Selimski

Roman, who I briefly met in Berlin when he got a puncture from the same smashed bottle that done for The Pistette has some good shots from God Hates Tyres HERE.
Thanks Roman.

This one of Kamil on his way to losing a finger nail and gaining joint first in Best Crash is my favorite:



These photos I picked make it look like it was just couriers, but I'd say it was about a 50-50 between messengers and fak... um, f... err... what-d'you-call-'ems? Cyclists?
Here's one of 'em:

GOD HATES TYRES - RESULTS

It went really well. I was going to say it was the most fun I've had on a bike this year but seeing as apart from arriving and leaving the only time my bike got ridden was by The Big Bopper so it would have to have been the most fun I've had off my bike this year... except it wasn't. But you get the general idea of what I'm trying to say, don't you? Well I hope you do because I'm not even sure if I'm still following what I'm trying to say.
It was good.
I'm not about to describe it's goodness in detail so if you weren't there here's a few photos:

Selim has some HERE
Fred has some excellent shots of the Flaming Skidtles HERE
If anyone else has some photos could you email us a link or if you just have a couple of camera phone shots send then in and we'll stick 'em up.

Here's the results:

LONGEST SKID

1 Ross 20 : 320ft ( ran out of space )
2 Hillbilly 12 : 196ft
3 Janky 39 : 187ft
4 Eddie 27 : 183ft
5 Johnny Fitz 26 : 180ft
6 Sketch 30 : 146ft
Everyone else came far behind the top six.

1st Girl Braley 09 : Forgot to take a note but it was less then 146ft ( Braley if you can remember how far you went send us an email please )

SKIDTLES

1 Janky 39 : 8/10
2 Vojtech 24 : 7/10
3 The.Pike 36 : 6/10

TRACKSTAND

1 Ryan 21
2=Ben 22
2=Keith 45
( All three made it to one footed )

1st Girl Justa 07
2nd Girl Braley 09


FOOTDOWN

1 Ross 28
2 Arsen 32
( Ross won by sort of falling on top of Arsen )

FOOTDOWN PRACTICE
( which everyone thought was the actual comp so the winner got a prize )
1 Matt 20


BEST CRASH

1=Kamil 18
1=The.Pike 36
( hopefully someone will have pictures )

Thanks to everyone who came along and thanks for not taking it too seriously, competitions are only fun until they turn into competitions.

Thanks to the following people who helped out in big and small ways:

Selimski
Little Jon
Mikey QBoss
Ian Sano
Juliet Hell Yeah
Janky James
And thanks to everyone who helped keep the Skidtles burning, especially whoever donated the Rum when the kerosene ran out.

Whether you realised it or not you were all part of a team that helped make the night the load of fun it was.

Thanks again to all the sponsors:

Skin Grows Back
Madison
Gallus Cycles
Archie's Grobags
Vans

And on a final note £110 was raised for the L.C.E.F.

Next up this:



MORE DETAILS HERE

GOD HATES TYRES - TONIGHT

See all y'all down there.
Turn up early for a practice mess around.

++I've just heard Ross from Brixton Cycles will be coming. If he decides to enter you've all just been beaten. We're going to need a bigger park.++

GHT - UPDATE

Right! With two days to go everything strangely seems to be under control. The shirts are printed, the spokecard are laminated and last night I lost half and eyebrow testing the flaming skittles out. It feels a bit strange not leaving everything til the last minute, so who knows maybe this event will actually start on time, and that time would be 7:30pm.



Speaking of last minute there will be some prizes from Madison* who are throwing in some Continental tyres and some of these lovely things:



I could've done with one of them in Berlin 'cos after a certain number of drinks ( which I managed to reach at a ludicrously early time in the day... every day ) it takes me ages to open a bottle with a lighter and I usually end up setting fire to the person standing next to me.
Thanks again to Sano from Fixed Mag for pointing Madison in our direction. We now have more prizes for this one comp than were given away in 4 Millportpolocos, so with that sorted it just remains to head over to the Weather Centre to find out what the fucking sky is thinking of doing this Friday:

Mostly nice and sunny.


With a slim chance of it shitting it down later on.





*I always thought Madison was a weird name for a Cycling distributor and assumed it was named after the owners mother or something, then I found out it was a type of race. If I ever name a company after a race I think I'll probably go with "Puke Sprints".

ECMC BERLIN - AWESOME

So awesome that I came 20th in the Mainrace, well that's what it says on the results page on the ECMC website and what with that legendary German efficiency I can't believe it could possibly be wrong.
I mean I'm pretty sure I was asleep when my heat started and I thought I spent the whole day of the Finals drinking in a tunnel with Dublin's finest, but a lot of the weekend was a bit of a blur ( and by 'Blur' I mean 'Blackout' ) so there's a slim chance that I got out there did the race. It's not too unlikely seeing as after previous blackouts I've managed to wake up Engaged, in a different country and in jail* so waking up 20th fastest courier in Europe would just be another thing to add to the list.



The discovery of this is just the icing on cake of an amazing weekend so big Thanks to everyone who helped organise a great weekend in Berlin and thanks to Gareth for being so cool when he discovered us throwing The Pistette over the wall into one of the parties**.

In the interests of truth and honesty this photo Tom McGuire took better sums up my performance at ECMC:

If you end up on an escalator covered in muck chances are you're not about to place in the top 20 European Messengers.

You can see Selimski's pics HERE.
And Justa has captured some of the off-the-bike action HERE.


*But not all on one night... obviously.
**The masterplan to get out of paying the measly €5 for the party was for an international Scotland/Ireland/USA team of messengers to throw The Pistette over a 15ft high wall into the courtyard of the party where I was waiting to catch her. Unfortunately from inside the party it was impossible to tell which part of the wall she was going to be coming over and in the end I only missed her by a couple of feet, but her injuries were nothing compared to what she was going to do to herself stagediving later on and we wound up paying the €5 anyway so in the end everyone was happy.

GOD HATES TYRES - UPDATE - NOW WITH TRACKSTANDING zzzzz

With two weeks to go we've already got 20 entries*, but a lot of people's general response has been "Oooh. I'll come but I'm not very good at skidding far.". It would seem these days with the fast progression of Fixed Gear tricks that learning how to take ages to stop is not high on peoples list, wheelies seems to be what the kids want nowadays. But long, long ago back in a time called "The Nineties" the forerunner of what would eventually become Fixed Gear Freestyle was the "King/Queen of Fixed" competition at Messenger Events it was ( and I think, still is ) a title awarded to whoever did best in the three Track Bike specific events which were Longest Skid, Trackstand and Backwards Circles**. So look on this as an Old School comp and come and bask in some heritage, and I wouldn't worry about embarrassing yourself by only doing a short skid. This is not the sort of event that's going to be heavy on serious competition, I means Skidtles was invented for Millportpoloco which is basically a whole weekend dedicated to embarrassing yourself.

There's also some pretty nice prizes on offer ( the vans box is for illustration purposes only, the winners get a voucher so they can get whatever style and size they want ) and we seem to have more prizes than events.



The pile above doesn't even include the Archie's Grobags stuff. So after some discussion we've decided to include a Trackstand comp, which opens up the event for pretty much anybody, and makes it a more traditional Track Bike competition with Skidtles replacing Backwards Circles. If you're just coming to spectate you can have a Disco Nap during the Trackstand comp which will the following format: Trackstand for 2mins then 1 hand off then remove 1 limb after every 2 minutes until you're hovering. Last person upright is the winner.
Depending on how we are for time we may add extra events on the night, we'll see.


Special mention has to be made of the SkinGrowsBack HATE D-Lock holder:



This is the first time I've actually considered swiping a prize item for myself but for some ludicrous reason that has yet to prove of any benefit I was raised to be honest, so for the time being the old Dickies pocket will have to do.

*That's just the one's wanting Tee Shirts.
** I've actually seen someone win backwards circles on a geared mountain bike with more than 10 circles, I'm still not sure how they did it.