Tag Up

Under the bridge I got married on there's been some tag art aslong as I can remember. Boom Niak as been there over a year.

The troll at the bottom of the bridge leading over the Kansas River into Fairfax has been busy lately.

These new tags showed up and some of them are pretty good but I kept putting off going down to shoot them.

I saw I story in the Kansas City Scar about how they're going to use block grants or something to eradicate the problematic graffiti in the area. Fine by me, there are a bunch of trashy gang tags I'd cover up myself if I wasn't too cheap to buy the paint.

On the flip side, there is a lot of 'tag' art that really is the only improvement a community gets sometimes.

The West Bottoms seems to be one of those areas.

I'd actually rather tolerate a few gang tags and bad scribbles than have tax dollars wasted obliterating real art.

The story said they were going to replicate the 'success' they'd had at the bottom of the 12th Street Viaduct. Not every piece down there was amazing, but there were several bonafide works of art and a few others clearly done by artists with some promise, feeling their way and developing a style.

Then one day some assholes came in with gray paint and desecrated the whole gallery. It was completely indiscriminate no doubt because a painter was contracted to cover it all up without regard to whether a given piece was actually an improvement over gray paint on concrete.

But I guess that gray paint makes a good base for future pieces.

My Other Car

I have an indecent affection for my bike. I sometimes just stop and take pictures of it.

Well, I might have been having a beer and making a phone call when I got the wild hair to take these shots at the top of Beardsley right before the sun started to set.

I think an un-cut fork with a second spacer is in my near future to perfect the fit, and I'll go back to cork bar tape I'm pretty sure, the pads and cloth tape I switched to don't measure up. If the cloth lasts longer, so what? The cork isn't that expensive and it's so much more comfortable.

I upgraded locks somewhat. I have a Wal-Mart Kryptonite U-Lock I bought on the clearance aisle back when I lived in Gardner. I figured locks just keep honest people honest, and at fifteen bucks, it was a deal.

Since hearing about some locals who lost bikes I got to thinking that while a somewhat more robust lock might not guarantee anything (a portable angle grinder and all bets are off), I'd feel like an ass if I lost the Tall Pale Hooker over saving $35.

I didn't go all the way to a 'New York Lock,' I went with an OnGuard Pitbull, slightly lighter and more locally available. Midwest Cyclery had a New York chain lock from Kryptonite, but it was three times the price and three times the weight. I don't count grams, but a fifteen pound lock is more than I want to haul around.

I still use the cheapie Kryptonite when I load the bike on my car. The Thule rack has a lock for the arm that holes the top bar, but I realized anyone could take the front and back wheels pretty easily if they were so inclined. So if I'm going to be parking anywhere along the way, I use one U-Lock to secure the front wheel to the frame, the other to do the back wheel. Someone with the right tools could just leave with the whole thing, rack and all, but I won't be a crime of opportunity.

My old line on this is lock it like you're between a methadone clinic and a pawn shop, because if the right person sees your bike, that's exactly where it is.

The Great Brisket Experiment

Local Pig is an artisanal butcher shop or, if you prefer, charcuterie. My Dealer has been raving about it, and when they provided bacon for BLTs at the Great Tomato Tasting, I learned that it's owned by a guy I know from homebrewing circles.

I'm not new to the idea here. Factory farming sucks. Nothing is perfect, but being inhumane to animals, exploitative of people and producing an inferior product is a pretty bad combination.

And no, I'm not interested in vegetarianism.

I remember the first time I found out I liked ham. I was almost thirty years old, and up until then I thought that ham was a meat I could only eat when the option was to be flat-out rude to my host.

We visited my first wife's birthmother on her farm in Nebraska, and were served ham for dinner. The artist then known as Frau Lobster tried to cover for me by saying something like, 'Mashed potatoes, your favorite!' so I could eat a minimal amount of ham and fill up on sides.

I had just met these people, and I figured I could choke down anything to be a good guest. I took a bite of that ham and had a religious conversion.

It was one of the best things I'd ever eaten, and I think I had thirds, possibly being a bad guest by reason of gluttony.

The ham wasn't from the store, it was from their farm. It had run around and eaten table scraps and I think they'd even named it. Then one day they took him to the butcher and had him slaughtered, carved up into pieces, and in the case of the ham and bacon, smoked with a dry rub. No brine was injected into the meat the way you get with a 'ham and water product' ham.

So Local Pig promised to have the same basic idea, but available in the East Bottoms

I rode my bike there from work, and I had a little trouble finding it. If you go down the Chestnut bridge/trafficway/hill, to the bottom where the Finish Line diner is, turn left and then an immediate left again. Go past Knuckleheads, across the tracks, and the charcuterie is right there on the corner.

In 20/20 hindsight, I should have bought some sausages and headcheese. They have cases of them, all sorts of varieties, and I suspect it is where this type of operation, specializing in humanely raised, local animals, really shines. But it's been too long since I fired up the smoker, and they had dry aged beef on offer, too.

I got a brisket flat, and honestly, the fat cap was so thick I almost balked and went with something else. Eight bucks a pound, literally twice the price of a 'choice' grade from Bichelmeyers, where I normally get braising cuts for my Weber Smokey Mountain.

I wondered, is that four bucks per pound I save the price of cruelty, antibiotics and hormones? Will I be able to taste the difference?


I got some grass matured ground beef while I was there, too. And after I'd loaded my bike with twelve pounds of high-dollar meat, I got to thinking, Wait, how'd they get a fat cap like that on a grass matured brisket?

I went back in and inquired, and yep, their beef is finished on corn except for that grass fed ground beef. The guy said they tried a couple of grass matured animals for roasts and steaks but they were 'so awful.'

By which I think he meant gamey the way bison can be. I've had corn fed bison that was indistinguishable from beef, so I'm pretty sure it's the diet rather than the precise species and breed that really matters. Maybe if I want meat like that I should finally figure out a borrowed rifle and a deer tag this fall.

The grass fed ground produced really good burger, maybe on the dry side because of how lean they are and the fact that my youngest daughter had a seizure at the perfect time to keep me from pulling them off the grill medium-rare.


For the brisket I decided to do a test. I got a brisket flat from Bichelmeyer and rubbed both it and Local Pig's with my patent-pending rub (brown sugar with a wide variety of spices, red and black peper, cumin, cinnamon, ground cloves, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, turmeric, nutmeg and whatnot) and put them both in the smoker.

I swapped their positions about eight hours in. The temperature in the smoker never got above 250ºF, never below 220ºF, and the meat was in there for sixteen hours.

The Bichelmeyer brisket appeared more marbled, had almost no fat cap, and was eight pounds. The Local Pig was just shy of ten pounds, and had a fat cap so thick, like I say, I almost didn't buy it.

The Bichelmeyer dried out pretty good, though using the 90 minutes per pound formula, I should have gotten up in the middle of the night to pull it. I didn't do that.


The Local Pig tasted fantastic but was almost too juicy/greasy. I resolved these two problems by chopping both briskets together and mixing them up. The result was just about perfect as far as the fat/lean thing goes and the flavor was fantastic.

I'll try Local Pig again for some other cuts and/or those sausage type things. The brisket part I'm still struggling with: it seems like too much of a price difference to justify, but maybe I'm being too much of an American. If you really assume a four ounce serving of meat is a 'serving' the stuff is only two bucks a serving. Maybe I need to dial down my actual serving size to that four ounce level rather than look for excuses to buy $4/pound brisket that has likely been factory farmed.

A note on the photography, by the way: I was really tired when I woke up to pull the meat from the smoker, and still half asleep when I shot these pictures after my wife and house guests had tucked into a breakfast of smoked meat. I know the Local Pig was cut with the grain instead of across it; I can tell my depth of field was insanely shallow/narrow; and I know that on top of that my shots inside the charcuterie had the white balance set all wrong.

So will I be back to Local Pig? Bichelmeyer? I think yes to both.

Copper Steeple

I ride by this church on my way to work. Someone must have been putting in a good tithe to finance the copper steeple they're doing. It's beautiful, though.

Taste This!

The Fourth Annual Greater Kansas City Tomato Tasting was nothing I wanted to miss.

 As I loaded the meager (considering the eighteen plants in my garden) offering I had to sample into my panniers, Corinna predicted that I would arrive with nothing but tomato paste.

I thought it odd advice, given this is a person who will slap a bike inner tube over slices of pizza to transport it so we can eat it 'some place better.' I thought the pizza-by-the-slice restaurant was a fine place to eat pizza.

I had my tomatoes packed mostly in a hotel ice bucket slid into a pannier, which kept them from being compressed by anything but each other. When I got there, a couple had split slightly, but they were far from paste.
A friend expressed regret that she hadn't brought her bike rack, so she could offer me a ride. Then she realized that I had a car, I rode fifteen miles to the tasting because it pleased me to do so.

There's sometimes a strange balance of pity between car people who assume that a transportational cyclist is only riding because of poverty or excessive DUI arrests, and transportational cyclists who wish car people knew half what they were missing out on.

Local Pig, which turns out to be owned by a friend of mine from the homebrewing/beer judging world donated bacon for BLTs. And what bacon it was: no brine, humanely raised, local pork that walks in their back door and gets sold out the front.

We had about sixty varieties of tomatoes to sample, and tickets to vote on our five favorite. I felt that was too few, I think I voted for Purple Haze, Paul Robeson, Barracker's Favorite, Black Cherry, Carbon, and then went, Wait! What about Cherokee Purple?

And a few others. There are tomatoes I don't like, but they are in a definite minority at an heirloom and boutique hybrid tasting.

And I got a great picture of my friend Julie. Julie is a great photographer, which is why it's hard to get a good picture of her, since she's normally hiding behind a monstrous full-frame camera and a big-ass lens.

Rosedale Arch

Stopped on the way home from the Tomato Tasting here. My shot of downtown was blocked by trees, at least until someone gets a chainsaw going or fall comes.

Safety Third!

This was a hard Critical Mass for me to enjoy.  I saw four crashes, one of whom was a friend, none of whom were wearing helmets.

I know, I'm an old man who remembers when there was no internet, only one phone company and the television had three channels.  There was also no such thing as a bicycle helmet back then.

And I did stunts on my BMX, rode my bike to deliver a paper route, rode skateboards, etc., all with no head protection at all.

I don't think there was much in the way of useful head protection available back then. We're talking about when the plains were black with buffalo, right? Three channels on the TV, and the height of sophisticated, elite communication was the pager (only worn by doctors), a device which allowed you to type in your number so they could call you back from a phone that was connected to yours by wires.

Thing is, helmets won't help when you get rear-ended by a car going 40 miles per hour. They won't help when you get side-swiped by a run away dump truck. But these are scenarios so rare they aren't worth considering. You might as well worry about what you'll do with the big winnings off a lotto ticket.

The slipsy-fallsy thing, though? That happens to us all. And in my experience, I'm down before I know I'm going to fall, and more than once I've realized that gunshot sound was my helmet taking the abuse for me.

The cool kids who go without helmets don't generally mount such a great defense as 'it won't matter when I get run over by a bus.' They say things like 'I forgot' or 'it seems so expensive, a helmet.'

I don't know if the cottage-cheese-and-ketchup special I saw Friday night offered such lame excuses for her helmetlessness. The copious blood on the pavement was seeping out of lots of beautiful, curly hair, so maybe she didn't know that helmet hair is sexy.

The party mood was eventually revived, and by the time we got down to the river there was a girl a couple of guys had tried to likkered up who turned the tables on them. And a good time was had by all, or all who weren't in the ER by then.

Excellent Taste / Drunken Weaving

I missed the Greater Kansas City Tomato Tasting last year, can't recall why but I struggle to think of something that would have been worth skipping it.

Tomorrow morning I ride out at 7:00 a.m. on my bike with some not quite labeled tomatoes. I have an idea about the varieties, the Carbon is obvious, so is the Yellow Pear and Black Cherry. I'm pretty sure about the Pale Perfect Pearl, Aunt Ruby's German Green, and Barracker's Favorite.


But not certain. My fist year growing heirlooms I documented to a tedious excess, every pruned branch, every ripening fruit. Then there was the year I divided my time between two houses, followed by the year I got married right when you're supposed to put a garden in.


I had a partial, half-ass map at one time, but I can't find it. I'm riding out to the tasting with a couple pounds of excellent tomatoes but I can't prove the pedigree of any of them, really.


Anyway, the process of harvesting for the tasting lead to me retying and staking the plants. I did a lot of pruning, and had to deal with Japanese and Thai teenagers in the case of a couple of plants (the youth in Asia are my last resort, but when I fear a plant will take down fifteen neighbors, it's gotta go).

My stakes didn't get as deep as I'd liked, and some are pretty old and rotten. All the plants I grow are indeterminate heirlooms, might get four feet high, might get twelve. Anyway, I was tying and pruning and realized that two of the stakes were leaning in opposite directions, so I tied them to each other. Then I remembered a staking scheme I saw online called the 'Florida weave' that involved lacing tomatoes through a fence. My plants seemed more like a pack of intoxicated sailors struggling to help each other back to ship before their liberty expires. So after much interconnecting of fates, I give you the Drunken Weave.