Is there a better way to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon than riding around with your buddies, drinking beer, listening to James Brown on my mobile soundsystem and "dancing" under a bridge? You decide.

Le Tour de Your-Own-Damn-Self

Thinking of a cool tour? How about picking the Tour de France route from your birth year and retracing the whole thing? Sounds cool and original, right? Cool yes - original? Not anymore.

Joe from Reno is doing it right now suckers. And he's doing it on a Surly - just like Coppi woulda if he wasn't deader'n hell.

Joe's blog

Speaking of the Tour, I heard Lance Armstrong is riding RAGBRAI this year. I'm guessing ol' Lance has me beat in terms of talent, hard work, dedication, and determination - but I bet he can't start the day with a warm Milwaukee's Best Ice Light, stop at every cemetery gathering, eat 5 gigantic Iowa pork chops a day, and roll in after dark swerving like a sailor on shore leave only to do it all again the next day. THAT'S courage my friends.

- Skip

This is a picture of Sovern in a bunny suit, floating in Surly's Anomoly Containment Unit.



See, Sov was sitting at his desk this morning when I got here, talking to a customer on the phone, and I accidently pushed the wrong button on the Surly Central Processing Command Center computer masterboard. I thought it was the hot chocolate dispensing button. There was a quick, bright flash, the smell of burning hair, and the next thing I knew Sov was about 10% of his original size and inexplicably dressed in a bunny costume. At first I didn't know where he'd gone, but he jumped off his now-enormous chair, stomped over to my desk in a miniature rage, and kicked me in the big toe. His voice is now high and squeaky, and he is super pissed off about it, as later this afternoon he has to --and I am not making this up-- call a watermelon seed spitting contest (maybe it has something to do with playing the banjo, I don't know. I do not dwell long enough to educate myself on his myriad perversions).
Unsure what to do, I grabbed him and threw him in the ACU chamber, where we keep all the weird crap produced by the CPCC computer, like the fixed gear derailleur, bullhorn handlebars, and Brauer, until such time as the anomoly du jour can be stabilized and refined into an actual product or absorbed back into the shitstem...er, system.
Turns out the button is the Random Idea Modifier (we have one of those?). I never did get my hot chocolate.

Steamrollers back in stock very soon

49cm and 56cm Steamroller framesets should be back in stock very soon, either today or Monday. 53cm, 59cm and 62cm should be in stock early next week.

Karate Monkeys should be completely stocked by next week also.

After these two models, Long Haul Trucker framesets and Cross-Check complete bikes are the only thing we're really hurting on. Utility Blue LHTs and Dark Green or Black Cross-check bikes should be ready 1st week of July. Cherry Red LHTs won't be ready until the end of July.

OK, time to go ring my cowbell at the Nature Valley Gran Prix road crit downtown. Hopefully we'll get a sprinkle of rain so there are more crashes. We Minnesotans grew up with hockey, so a little blood seems just a natural part of any sport.

Sorry to interupt the shenanigans with a serious blog entry but we want to give a shout out to Sam and Laura who are riding Surly Long Haul Truckers from Washington State to Maine to raise money for IBD. They dubbed their ride "Tour de Guts," and you can read more about their quest by going here.

Best wishes on your ride and thanks for supporting Surly!

Cotton-headed ninny muggins?!?

Oh, that's it. I think it's time for "throw-shit O'clock"

-Sov

Johnny Gay Is In The House

It's funny what you sometimes find when you do a search for "Surly" on ebay. Trust me, Sov does this on a daily basis.

Last week, he was tortured by one listing in particular: A 7-inch single released on Stag records by none other than Johnny Gay (?). The song is titled Slowly But Surly.

Yeah, I'm sure you've heard it.

Anyhoo, he was too much of a cotton-headed ninny muggins to bid on it, so I finally hit the bid button and now this beauty is mine!



It arrived in yesterday's mail sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard, no dust jacket, slightly warped, scratched to all shit and covered in dust; Just like a record of this nature should be.

I'll let you in on a little secret. Dave is currently working on the design for our Interbike trade show booth, and I'm not going to say the theme isn't heavily based on the whole Johnny Gay phenomenon. Heck, if we can work it out we'll schedule an appearance by the man himself, to sing this immortal tune and maybe sign some autographs, if you're lucky.

Anyone know where we can find him?

By the way, the B-side of the single is a tasty "instrumental" version of the A-side, so there!

Some people take the whole 666, number of the beast, be afraid of the devil, pentagram, upside down cross thing quite seriously. For us, it's an excuse to play loud metal music and scare people, or attract people, or confuse people.

So we started off the morning with a headbanging ride to work. Blake arranged the playlist to include Slayer, Black Sabbath, Motorhead and many others. We started out at Leder Brothers metal scrap in South Minneapolis, because that is where dead Surly bikes are sent to their grave.

In the foreground, you'll see my latest incarnation of the Xtracycle partybike. An iPod and 2 battery powered amplifiers run dual sets of speakers. It's loud, but not quite loud enough for the headbanging we were doing this morning. Or perhaps it was the puddles of water that built up in the tweeters from yesterdays downpour. Either way, metal-appropriate measures will be taken in the future to improve the sound.



But it was loud enough to get all the kids waiting at bus stops and old folks walking around to crack a grin. The only people that didn't seem to appreciate our cure to the quiet morning were the middle agers. Bummer. There was even a little Twisted Sister played as we rolled through my former elementary school parking lot. Hopefully those kids will know what they want to do with their lives, and that is to rock!

However you decide to celebrate today, crank some tunes and bang your head. It is the national day of Slayer, afterall.

First, Lara kicks ass.

Second, I neglected to say anything about this earlier but it's cool enough to warrant mention late in the game even though the TransIowa race is bedded down in the history pamphlets for another year. Surly gave a frame as a prize for this year's TransIowa race, which turned out this year to be one big gravelly bog snorkel. It was so tough (and it's supposed to be tough) that no one actually finished. The video I saw shows people slogging it through the ditches because the roads themselves were too swampy. TransIowa mastermind Jeff Kerkove said of this year’s attempt:

“Insane amounts of rain during the days leading up to and during the event caused none of the 70 registered racers to make the 6 PM Saturday cut off. Due to the weather all riders threw in the towel. Most people made it about 70 miles, but just to give you an idea of how tough conditions were, the leaders took 2 hours to go 9 miles in the later part of the first half of the course.”

Yeah, western Iowa’s like that in spring. Since Kerkove and the Planning Committee (if that isn't a band name it should be) already had all the prizes, and since people showed up and raced (as much as they could, anyway), K&tPC decided to give out the prizes. That's cool. But I didn't hear the whole story until I got into contact with the winner of the frame, Lindsay Gauld, of Winnipeg, MB (which isn’t in or even near Iowa), who told us this:

“I went 132 miles and at that point myself and Dallas stopped at a bar for a burger and a short break. I phoned Mark to let him know we were still alive and would be about 4 1/2 more hours. He said that they'd already had the awards ceremony and as we were the only ones still riding they'd awarded us the first prizes. As everyone was leaving, we decided not to make our friend Paddy wait till we arrived and rode down the highway for 14 miles to meet him.”

What?! Oh, and to put the dot on that exclamation point, Lindsay also says:

“It's a great prize for me as I'm a 58 year old who recently sold Olympia Cycle in the Peg and is now working as a bike courier. I pinch myself in disbelief every time they give me a cheque for riding my bike.”

So….still think you’re tough? Better go on a training ride right now, ya lightweight.

Third, the International Bicycle Film Fest is coming to MPLS. Local BFF coordinator GirlCarl is excited:

"I can't wait for this. Seriously. Some of you know already, but I'm telling everyone. The Minneapolis version of the 6th annual Bicycle Film Festival is July 6 - 8. One On One is our extra special sponsor and we'll be screening fantastic bike films in this way:
Thursday July 6th @ Riverview Theater
Friday July 7th @ Bell Museum Auditorium
Saturday July 8th @ Soap Factory
Look for festival programs in a few weeks. Rumors of after parties, alleycats, beer, valet bike parking and self-actualization are all true.
We're totally ready, except we need these things:

1 megaphone
several sets of bleachers
250 water balloons
6 trays of deviled eggs
78 volunteers

Be in touch if you have any of those lying around the garage.
Carl Atkinson
carl@bicyclefilmfestival.com”


You know who else is excited? Brauer. He sent Brauermail saying, "There will be some cool films I'm sure. Tell everyone you know, and lets show these other cities what real bike culture is!"

Get in touch with your inner Ebert and/or your inner Brauer (Brebert? Eauer? Hell, I don't know...). That is all.

PRODUCT ETA UPDATE - FRAMES

You might have noticed that availability on our frames has become poor in the past couple of weeks. Honestly, we have gone to great lengths to make sure we had good inventory this year but you folks just keep buying them at greater and greater rates, so we done run out of many of them.

Anyhoo, here is the tentative schedule of incoming frames:

6/4
CROSSCHECK Frames Pearl Dark Green All Sizes
CROSSCHECK Frames Black All Sizes

6/8
LONG HAUL TRUCKER Frames 52cm, 62cm Cherry Red
INSTIGATOR frames all sizes
KARATE MONKEY Frames Black All Sizes
PUGSLEY Frames 16", 18"

6/17
1 X 1 Lemon/Lime All Sizes
PACER frames all sizes Black
STEAMROLLER frames all sizes Gray
KARATE MONKEY Frames All Sizes Chocolate Squirrel

6/23
CROSSCHECK Complete Bikes Pearl Dark Green All Sizes
LONG HAUL TRUCKER Frames 42cm, 54cm, 56cm, 58cm, 60cm, 62cm Utility Blue

7/15
CONUNDRUM Frames, All Sizes/Configs
LONG HAUL TRUCKER frames, Cherry Red, All Sizes

So, please breath a collective sigh of relief, cuz help is on the way. Thanks for being patient.

See ya next week...