Trio category costume ideas for The Paranormal

With the unleashing of the much-acclaimed, always-requested, now-available TRIO CATEGORY at the Paranormal this year, I figured it would be worth a brain dump of all the Trio costume ideas I've had floating around in my grey matter (urine) for all these years - years that the Trio Cat has been oppressed.

Bel Biv Devoe
Ivana, Marla, and Melania Trump
The father, the son, and the whole wheat ghost*
Centipede
Paper Rock Scissors
MarioKart

And, of course, our own Breaking Bad

Three's Company
Knife, Fork, and Spoon
The Three Bears who ate Goldilocks
Three Notch'd Brewery
The Three Little Pigs
Love Triangle


*Also available on a gluten free bun

That list goes on and on and, of course,
Up Up Up.

This just in...

West Virginia kicks ass.

Also, pro tip - if you are easily disoriented and kinda scuzzy looking, marry a lady who can take up the slack for you.

You Are Here.  

This is what they call marrying UP.  

And up, and up, and up.  

In Triplicate

The Paranormal ROLLS!
BikeReg, FaceBook, and whatever other social technology the kids are into these days are all live.

If you're new to this little scene, you're in for a treat.  If you're a 15-year Paranormal Veteran like Iron Mike Walling, here are a few things you might notice are different this year:

1)  There's a TRIO category.  That's right...not one, not two, but three of you can race as one team for the low low price of $100.  And conveniently, if you play your cards just right, start third, and plod around the course with a maximum amount of socializing, costume malfunctioning, and other mechancal failures, you might be able to get away with doing only a single lap.  It'll take commitment, but it's out there for the taking.

The flip side of that, for those super fast individuals who want to know just how many laps could be commenced in a 6 hour window, I think you might be able to log 9 laps total.  And Petrylak will still beat all 3 of you.  By himself.  Added bonus that if your light fails in the woods, you'll be letting down not one, but two of your friends, creating awkward exchanges with both of them for months to come.

2)  Firepower.  If you've been watching the bike news, you'll have seen many pros didn't get contracts for 2017, because, you know, that shit is dying or whatever.  But their loss is our gain, as maybe some of them (former champs, KOM holders, and the like) will turn up and throw down some fast laps with the dregs of the rest of us.  Which, they'll maybe realize, is way, way better anyway.  Welcome home, boys and girls.

3)  COW COSTUMES.  My hope is that this will be the year of the Cow Costume, in all it's various shapes, colors, sizes, and smells.  Does a steak costume count as a cow costume?  Get well soon, Dad, there's a contest to judge.

Oct 22, the gun goes off at 4 PM.

There's one way to the top, and it's up, up, up.

I'm gonna pop some tags

For every thing that's wrong with cycling at the professional level, there are a thousand things at the grassroots level that are absolutely, 100% right.

Dirt
Shit talking
Crisp fall weather
Groomed ribbons of life-affirming single track
Wide-open racing
Drink--night riding
Night-drink riding
Night-Ride Drinking?  I'm not sure.  (But, please, save the kegs for the post-ride, and use your cupholders).
DJ'ed neutral support pits
Our community coming together as further evidence that, if anything, God loves costumes.

The list of what is right and good goes on and on.  Which, as you might guess, is just me starting to talk about The Paranormal.

Saturday, Oct 22 from 4 pm until 10 PM.

A few photos from yesteryear, and also the results:


I'll wear your granddad's clothes.  I look incredible.

Again, that date is Saturday Oct 22.  Race starts at 4, but those in the know know that it's an all day affair.  So start getting your costume together now, while the racks are still full and the pumpkin beer hasn't clouded your good judgement.

Smells like R Kelly's Sheets.  

You can register....where?  Well, the linky no worky yet, so I won't put it up here to confuse you.  But stay tuned, and I'm pretty sure we'll have that for you soon, along with my predictions for Paranormal greatness that are almost never right.

Here's to taking back our sport.  It'll be easy.  I'll just need to get my leopard mink cape out of my rear wheel first.

Sometimes racing means you gotta dress up, up, up.

Hey Francisco, Fuck You.

Up your ass, Canada.  

On Monday, longtime doper and cheater Francisco Mancebo won stage 5 at The Tour Of Alberta.

On Wednesday, Team Jamis-Sutter home - a longtime stalwart of domestic pro racing here in the USA - folded because of a lack of funding.

Well, no shit.

If I were Jamis, or Sutter Home, or any company here in the USA that was looking to invest my advertising dollars in such a way as to make product look better to my target market, I wouldn't pay for this shit either.

WHY THE FUCK IS FRANCISCO MANCEBO RACING IN NORTH AMERICA?

Mancebo still has 20 bags of his own blood leftover in Spain, waiting for him to drop by and pick it up from Operation Puerto.  Mind boggling.  It's hard to continue to try to be a fan of a sport that just can't stop kicking itself in the dick.

There's simply not enough money to pay clean athletes.  Ben King still doesn't have a contract to race in 2017.  Jake King, a stagiare with the now-defunct Team Jamis, might come up with zilch himself.  Clean, strong, good guys like the King brothers were supposed to be the future of cycling after Operation Puerto, the advent of the biological passport, Lance Armstrong's testimony, and all the other "we're cleaning up our sport" bullshit that the UCI sold us over the past 12 years.

But where are we instead?  Manchebo is still somehow winning races.  Valverde has raced all 3 grand tours in Europe this year.  Ryder Hesjedal is riding a farewell tour across the autumn races in Canada like some kind of goddamn national hero.  But the actual good guys don't have jobs.

I don't get it.  Never have, actually, but this one hits a little closer to home this time (like, literally in my house.)  Team Jamis-Sutter home has stayed here with me at the Rancho Relaxo the last two seasons for a week while in transit between East Coast races.  To a man, left to right, they're great guys.  The racers, the staff, all of them.  We ate dinners together.  Sebastian Haedo borrowed my fishing gear and caught some bass.  Luis Amaran and I watched The Revenant in Spanish.  Felix, their soigneur, read books to my kids.  Most of us who ride Tuesday Night Worlds from the 22936 every week have had the privilege of watching Jake King's progress as he matured, much like we did Ben's.  For me, Team Jamis folding is personal, and the lack of funding is representative of our sports' failure in general.

I wonder what 20 bags of blood even looks like?  What do you carry that around in?  How do you get that much blood out of a person in the first place?  Clearly, Mancebo understood the benefit and was 100% committed to the process.  I imagine it took months.  Shame on us, the paying public, for allowing it to work for him.

There's a commonality at work here, a close parallel that you might draw between Mancebo and Donald Trump, and our own unwillingness as a population to stand up for what is right.  This is way bigger than bikes.  The larger picture, as always, is about us, We The People.  It's like we've been desensitized to villainy somehow, by the movies, social media, drugs, the liberal media, or whatever you want to believe has brought us to where we are; but the result is simple apathy.  

This is not the movies.
The bad guys win if we let them.

Up, up, up.