Bike Smut / Return to Mass

After my AV fistula surgery right around a year ago, I had so many neuropathy issues with my left arm it just wasn't any fun to ride the bike. By the time the issues resolved, I was out of the habit of getting up early enough to ride to work. It was so easy to stay in bed another hour and drive.

I was going to ride to work this time for Critical Mass. But I didn't get up early enough to pull that off, so I put my bike on my car, drove to work, and then parked my car near the Bike Smut Film Festival and pedaled my way to Scumfresh for the ride.

This was my second Bike Smut. I went to the only other one I think Kansas City has ever had a few years back.

Bikes and smut, two of my favorite things. How could I miss it?

The last Bike Smut seemed to have more material that made me squirm a bit. I don't mean that as a criticism, I think I'm pretty broad minded when it comes to sex. We all have our kinks and fetishes, I don't think we pick them, they just happen. But the last Bike Smut had more moments where I cringed.

Not having biked much the past year, I was pretty gassed trying to keep up with the herd on Critical Mass. Which is pretty drag-ass slow.

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But then I caught up with the festival after riding myself embarrassingly ragged in only 11-ish miles. And it was all good. Gabe's girlfriend Steph even hoisted her Lucy-meets-Charlie-Brown skirt to show off her Bike Smut panties.

KCBM 35

So last summer I got diagnosed with Type II Diabetes. The doc I see at the apheresis clinic had drawn some labs and just casually asked, 'Who do you see for your diabetes?'

And I was like what diabetes?

He also said my liver enzymes could look better. "How much alcohol do you drink?" he asked.

As a friend of mine put it, you didn't just rain on my parade, you also shot the Grand Marshall.

I tried to bargain with the diabetes. I love beer. Good beer, not Miller Lite or Michelob Ultra (which don't send my blood sugar to bad neighborhoods). But no, the blood glucose levels don't even like a Bohemian Pilsner like Pilsner Urquell.

So I make allowances for competitions. They feed us like Hobbits at these things: first breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, etc.

Which, before I even tried to clean up my diet over the diabetes thing, was why I quit buying banquet tickets for the KCBM competition. I'm typically full from breakfast when lunch arrives, lunch is typically pretty heavy, and I'm not that big a supper eater anyway. If I'm going to pop for a $35 dinner, I want to go to the table hungry.

I feel like I'm in a rut with the pictures I've been taking at these things. Someone from the club commented to me during the auction that he liked my pictures, and I was like, they're the same pictures every year.

Same people, same setting, same activity anyway. I did take some of my meads from the past year, I got religion and read Steve Piatz's book on the subject, decided to be the old dog that learned new tricks, in no small part because of things Al Boyce said at a presentation at the Bier Meister's competition a couple years ago.

Al's initial response was they seemed like hydromels. He has a bit of a sweet tooth in this area, what he calls a semisweet I'd call a sweet; what he cals a sweet I call cloying pancake syrup. What I call dry he calls 'bone dry' with an obvious negative connotation.

Me, I favored dry meads before diabetes pushed me further into those woods. I wouldn't fancy my chances in competition with these things given how much Al's scale of sweetness seems to be the rule.

I did have Al and two or three others suggest my raspberry melomel would benefit from more acid. Which surprised me, the five gallon batch had almost 20 pounds of the fruit, and it's a pretty acidic fruit. But given the people who were asking for more acid, I'm game to try next time. Maybe take a small sample of the batch, add acid blend in varying quantities to the finished mead and then scale up that addition accordingly when I find nirvana.

Oh, and we had KCBM royalty show up. The closing panel before the banquet included Boulevard founder John McDonald, along with brewers from Red Crow, Crane and KC Bier Co.

I didn't stay for the banquet like I said, but at least I got a shot of Myles in his fez during the raffle. Which I bought a buttload of tickets for and yet won nothing. I guess as karma goes, I'm still paying off my score from a few years ago, my Snoop Dog oil painting.

It's a hiphop version of a velvet Elvis, and it hangs over the recliner I'm blogging from. I've looked in some pretty ghetto liquor stores and never found Colt 45 Blast in grape. But then, maybe my liver enzymes and diabetes don't want me finding that.

Infinity and Infinite Aggrandizement

When I was coming out of Through the Eyes of Picasso, I wasn't really spending much time on the work that fills the Bloch addition as we made our way up to the Dreams of Kings. But this caught my eye, a neon and mirror affair that has a really cool infinite loopiness to it. I think I need one of these for my house.

I didn't spend much time in the second exhibit actually, I was pretty wore out from the Picasso. The artifacts included a lot of jade, the pale kind the Chinese were into back in the day (the dark green stuff a lot of us think of is a latecomer). The stone is hard to work, and this king's burial suit was made of over 4200 plates of the stuff sewn together with silk and then bound with gold wire.

The resources that went into this burial suit, the hours of labor to mine the jade, cut it, polish it, fit it together, sew it, I wonder how many poor Chinese people starved to death or went without basic necessities so this cunt could be buried in the most expensive set of pajamas ever conceived. On behalf of the subjects of this 'king' I want to ask, who the hell do you think you are?

Don't show this suit to Donald Trump, he'll want one of his own.

Are You Mocking Me?

Long tradition: I don't think Mo has ever not struck this pose when passing the wax guard at the Nelson.

Plaza Lights

I think I need to go back late at night. Between people walking into my shots and car traffic, it was a challenging thing to get good photos of the Plaza lights this evening.

A person even asked me, 'Are you recording?' I said yes, and then she walked right in front of the camera anyway. Like she was only asking to make sure she was fucking up my shot.

I was shooting with my ultra-wide Tokina 11-16mm. It'll go to f2.8 as far as wide open shooting goes, but for a landscape situation at night, a lot of times the long exposure at the higher f-stop is the winner.

My D7000 doesn't autofocus, generally, in such low light. Which is frustrating. Seems like at one time I was able to get it to do so more often in these situations but that may be a faulty memory. It's hard to manually focus as crisply as the autofocus when it's working. I use the selective focus where I can target a spot in the viewfinder that I want to be tack sharp and let the depth of field work itself out from there. Looking through the viewfinder or chimping after the shot is pretty limiting, you get home and see it big and up-close on your computer and it's a whole different shot.

It's interesting the things you notice when you do these long shots. Fountains that seem like really good subjects until you notice the shit floating in them or the jets that aren't functioning.