So I’m really busy still road tripping so updates and posts are hard to spend time doing. So here’s some more background files on my monthly column in Dirt Magazine, Whistler Diaries.

This one is from Issue 78, August 2008. It was titled Media Neutrality, and is a prime example of weird rambling oddness. Im pretty sure the first 600 words of the 1300 is totally un related to the subject of the column. Go read it for yourself…

The thing I enjoy the most about this page is that it doesn’t have to concern itself with such trivialities such as the usual limitations to media neutrality such as political biases, censorship (most of the time, eh Ed?), pressures from advertisers, or the preferences of the intended audience. It doesn’t have to care one fucking iota about any of this.

It’s not particularly bothered if it alienates some of the readership of this magazine, in particular certain Internet forum users, 24 inchers, and ‘street’ mountain bikers. These people can go get stuffed cause there’s plenty of internet forums where other sub-species of human will be willing to embrace these cretins.

If someone has to censor this dribble then it means it’s touching a nerve, which is infinitely better than losing your nerve.

This page has never tried selling it’s soul to the highest bidder, but if it did then I reckon it would be a worse deal than the time the tiger economies of Asian had to succumb to the SAPs of the IMF to stave off financial collapse. However if any companies out there want to send WD their awful Taiwanese catalogue crap then it will be willing to start devoting all of it’s column inches each month to telling the readership of this fine magazine all about it. But there’s no promise that it won’t write about how monumentally bad said product is.

This page doesn’t try and be neutral because if something needs to be said then it’s worth saying. Forget what your mum told you about “If you’ve got nothing nice to say then don’t say anything”. This page has its biases, views, and opinions and that’s the currency we trade here. It can be quite obvious with its partisan affiliations and opinions.

The Diaries are happy to shout from this printed rooftop that it is on the board of directors of various tourist destinations, or that it thinks lockout suspension is the dumbest gimmick in modern mountain bike history. I mean, why would you ever need to lock it out? If it is such a poorly designed suspension platform or defectively produced shock that you need to lock it out then that company should not sell it to start with, and you should not have bought it.

But the best thing about this page is that it has nothing to do with the News. There is no news cause it happened months ago by the time you read this. What’s the point of news on this page? Unless you are living under some rock then you have the Internet and you can scan the web every five minutes for the news. I mean look, even Wales has Internet and certain members of the assembly have been given keys to the server, hence www.dirtmag.co.uk has all the latest and greatest breaking news, videos and funny pictures. Go check it out.

[CLANG!!!] Opps, sorry I think I dropped something back there.

Basically put, what this page deals in is completely subjective observations and biased opinions based on absolutely zero factual empirical evidence.

This month is no different. This month the Diary wants to talk about one thing that Whistler is all about and two things that are increasingly not about Whistler – trains, brakes, and gears.

Trains, this is what whistler is all about. If you hear one coming then get off the rails instead of complaining when it rumbles all three of your Titanium bolts out of your brake rotors and you end up wishing you hadn’t taken up trying to convince young girls you aren’t a badly dressed caricature of all things X-treme but are in fact the ‘real deal’.

Whistler is about riding in packs, and riding so close to the person in front of you that you can almost taste what they ate the night before.

On the flipside, brakes and gears are becoming obsolete in Whistler. A lot of the trails are becoming buff blindfold roller coasters. I’m not complaining, I quite enjoy shutting off my brain whilst I’m riding and thinking about greater issues like grocery lists or compiling a top ten of the mostest hottest chicks with names that rhyme with pavalova.

I mean I still enjoy riding a trail that is rougher than a $10 whore the day after the navy left port, but riding such trails day in day out leaves you feeling shakier than Michael J Fox on a fault line.

Nowadays all you need to do is roll into a trail and let it take you for a ride. No longer do you need to be on your game. Instead you can skull half a bottle of tequila on the chairlift on the way up and enjoy the ride down like you are sat in one of those hydraulic simulators they have at festivals that seemed like such a good idea when you are tripping on candy floss and overdosing on free samples of energy drinks, that is until the Technicolor flavour rainbow blows forth from your gob.

Brake companies should be hating on Whistler right now cause they are releasing a generation of such trails upon the world. Right now the stock price of Hayes, Avid, Formula, Hope, Magura should be plummeting. How long will it be till idiot wanna be BMX bikers start taking off their brakes?

But one peculiar thing is that braking bumps still pop up like a bout of herpes after a week in Newquay at half term.

Gears: by now the first Phat Wednesday (FYI the greatest race series ever invented) race of the year will of taken place and it regarded as de rigueur to see how fast one can cruise sans use of pedaling down one of the aforementioned roller coaster trails instead of seeing just how fast you can pin it.

At this time of the year there is lots of bullying and peer pressure by the cool crew to take off ones chain even if it is slower rather than try and get a good time by pedaling. Adam Mantle (one time pedaling advocate and small boy beater turned chainless time bomb) says it’s like Champery, where no one really cared that Matti Lehikoinen won, just that Sam Hill came third in the worst conditions. I told him it’s like comparing the results of the Olympic 100 metre sprint against the Paralympics 100 metre sprint, and if he really wanted to put himself at a disadvantage than why doesn’t he let one of his tires down as well.

But this race highlights how little people like to pedal in Whistler if they restrict themselves to the bike park chairlift. People become lazy and start seeing pedaling as a crime worse than hucking and that if you give in to pedaling then you are one step away from wearing a skin suit. Well I’m sorry people its not that bad. I think the phrase is “Harden the f**k up”.

However anyone doing a summer season realizes they cannot afford to replace rear mechs once they have smashed their second sparkling XO so are forced to embrace the chainless subculture. Instead of replacing their mech riders just wrap the cable around the seat stay, throw the chain into the bottom of their washing pile and just start scooting everywhere. Alot of the time riders will leave it that way for the rest of the season because it’s better to buy beer that will give you explosive diarrhea than to be able to propel your bike at anything more than a cruise. I think a lot of riders believe terminal velocity is 15 mph.

If none of this makes sense then go back to the start and just replace the word Whistler with the name of your favourite trail centre. I would do but I haven’t got a clue how to spell any of them and my spell check already gets quite the workout.

Yeah, the funny thing about the last sentence is that the grammar correction function should get a work out too.