Derailed Issue Three

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Ah, Patliacci. We already shared it on here with full context, so read the article if you want to know what the actual fuck we were banging on about with these cartoons. “I can’t believe I’d just gotten out of art school when I drew this” was the artist’s response when she saw it republished last year.

The rest is us at the height of our pomp. Absolute garbage. We love it.

March 30, 2008

This month we’re doing something different: We present the true story of Patliacci, a three-part comic about the UCI, the ASO, and how pretentious rubbish like a cycling reimagining of the opera “Pagliacci” just doesn’t work.

Production values: Through the roof. Commissioning a dweeb to draw for us doesn’t come cheap. We’ll be back to a written article next month, but a regular, less rushed comic strip is already in the works. Happily, thanks to this we’re probably the only website or magazine not featuring a cobble and mud motif this month.

That’s thinking outside the box. Where’s that lucrative media contract we’re waiting for?

Patliacci – Contents

Patliacci: Prologue
Tube Line Cyclists
Levi Fans’ Assos Shame
Email of the Month #1
Least Interesting Things Ever
Commentators Versus…
Patliacci: Act 1
Script Extract
Things to Look Forward to
Michael Rogers Exclusive
Animals on Bikes
Things to Do Before Coverage of
Promotional Image of the Month
Email of the Month #2
Patliacci: Act 2
Team Image of the Month
Email of the Month #3
Cruiser Bike Review
A40 Bike Lane Review
The Innertube

Patliacci: Prologue

London Underground Places that Sound Like Famous Cyclists

Bernard Hinault – Hainault
Theo Bos – Theydon Bois
Barry Hoban – Holborn
Floyd Landis – Cockfosters

Levi Fans’ Assos Shame

It’s rare that we actually like anything that anyone else has written about cycling, but we have to give credit where it’s due. Two pieces of satire about the Let Levi Ride campaign turned up that put our efforts to shame. They’re HERE and HERE.

WARNING: It’s in the style of that fake news nonsense that, bemusingly, Americans seem to hold as the height of wit. We knew there’d be a catch.

Email of the Month #1

From: Judy GEGA
To: DerailedUK
Subject: kirsehir

Even James Bond uses these pills to pleasure his girls. Be a super lover!

Top international lovers choose blue-pill. Join them!

Least Interesting Things Ever:

FREIBURG CLINIC
It’s bad enough that constant speculation and accusation suddenly passes as news within the cycling media, but even worse are the complete dumbasses on the internet treating the whole debacle as though it’s incontrovertible evidence that Andreas Kloeden is the missing link that proves Astana are doping, rather just being a rider who’s only on the team because the UCI’s contract laws didn’t allow Bruyneel to fire him. Gosh.

Commentators Versus…

YVONNE HIJGENAAR
Let’s get things straight: Yvonne Hijgenaar might’ve been our LONGEST STANDING POSTER GIRL, but we’ve got no idea at all how to say her surname any more. That’s not our fault, it’s the fact that every single media outlet pronounces it completely differently. Saying someone else’s name during sex is pretty bad, but if we got with Yvonne we’d be more worried about having to say her name.

Patliacci: Act One

Script Extract – “The odd Couple (of Cyclists)” Sitcom Pilot

INT. THE MOST EXPENSIVE HOTEL ROOM IN GRENOBLE, SOMETIME IN 1985.

BERNARD HINAULT is relaxing in his room when he hears a knock on the door. He opens it to see his team-mate GREG LEMOND standing before him.

GREG LEMOND
Bernie! Bernie!

BERNARD HINAULT
…

GREG LEMOND
Bernie! Bernie!

BERNARD HINAULT
What? What is it?

GREG LEMOND
Please drive me to the off-licence to buy some Strongbow! Pleeeeease!

BERNARD HINAULT
No, I’m busy. I’m going to do something for grown ups. Detonating badgers with dynamite. You wouldn’t like it.

GREG LEMOND
In America, we call them “racoons.”

Things to Look Forward to in 2008

Flanders or Roubaix being won by somebody so unlikely that they haven’t been picked as a favourite by any media outlet or fan other than one guy who’s only actually heard of three riders and now suddenly thinks he knows everything about the sport.
Cycling.tv to provide the best English-language coverage of Paris-Roubaix ever available, only for its messageboards to be full of people complaining because they use a Mac or think that the reason they can’t get live TV quality footage through their 56k modem is because of a massive conspiracy to take all their money.
A bunch of complete cocks referring to various Flemish races by their French names, as though that’s at all relevant to anything.

Michael Rogers Exclusive

What’s he up to these days?

Oh, right.

Animals on Bikes

We swore never to do this again after those poor little monkeys last month. But for every brown bear on a tallbike, there’s a dalmatian with huge testicles riding a tricycle.

In short, the positives outweigh the negatives.

So here’s some cow jumping. Cow is riding bike over ramps? Cow is jumping over bike? Bike is jumping over cow? CLICK TO FIND OUT.

Things to do Before Coverage of

…THE GIRO D’ITALIA

Take an eye test. RCS just love graphics that divide 35% of the screen into three small, distorted camera angles, and transform the other 65% into a delightful pink animated background featuring swirly patterns.
Practice your Italian. Especially relevant if you’re watching on Eurosport, since the host broadcaster’s nigh-indecipherable titles will be your only indication of what’s going on while the commentators talk about their latest sportive ride and how nice the rider they saw in the village yesterday was.
Don’t bother watching the best stage. Let’s face facts: It’ll be cancelled. Again.

Promotional Image of the Month

When he’s not getting his hair braided like a little girl and avoiding making eye contact with us at press conferences, Pippo Pozzato sells shoes.

That’s it, Pippo. Stare at the camera lens and think of the paycheck. It’ll all be over soon enough.

Email of the Month #2

From: Benita Abel
To: Bernadine Crain
Subject: The person caressed me

She grabbed my huge lovestick and made the most sexy, throaty voice I,ve heard in a LONG time!

Patliacci: Act Two

Team Image of the Month – QuickStep Camping it up Special

Quick Step appear to have taken Team CSC’s annual army field trip and decided that starting the season with an extreme camp is the way to go.

On the same day as getting hold of these images, we also received a badly translated press release referring to the team as “a fun bunch of gays.” COINCIDENCE?

Email of the Month #3

From: Micah Callough
To: DerailedUK
Subject: tdf

So forgetting that Levi is a whiner,what the hell is the justification of the TDD to exclude a team for offenses that the current members and mgmt has nothing to do with. HMMM lets think who is whining. Why not exclude the other teams that had to drop out in 2007 as well. Judge evenly or do not judge at all, oh wait its the French they are just pissed that they can not win their own race anymore.

Sunlova Cruiser Bike Review

We bought a beautiful California-style beach cruiser bike in mid-January to make the most of Britain’s delightful climate.

The weather’s been so miserable that we’ve still not managed to ride it. 2/10

Aside: We must sack the photographer who thought we were doing a wonderful make-believe Eastery scene with daffodils and springtime, rather than the reality of snow and wind and rain. It really HAS been too rainy to ride it, honest.

A40 Bike Lane Review

London, home of cycling, brings us this, the most awesome cycle lane in Britain:

King Ken is working hard in order to solve the inequality of motorists getting free run of a three lane dual carriageway compared to the cyclists’ one lumpy bike lane. The scheme will involve placing huge obstacles in the middle of the road with “drive here” signs written on them, in order to establish some kind of parity.

(Actually that would be AWESOME.)

Official score: 3/10

The Innertube

While we’re resisting Web 2.0 with our entire being, the rest of the internet continues to stumble towards social networking like zombies towards delicious horse brains. It’s all very good if you’re a teenage girl who wants hundreds of advances from older men and spotty youths with terrible fringes, but now there’s even cycling-specific “communities.”

THE INNERTUBE is the best of the lot. It’s created by Cycling TV, which naturally means that it’s a great idea but also relentlessly slow and impossibly difficult to use. It also suffers from that problem that afflicts the whole internet: Every single one of its denizens is apparently either crazy, autistic, or so stupid that it’s a wonder they’ve actually discovered the link between the arrow moving around the screen and the plastic thing they’re moving around the desk. Here’s the pick of the pack:

Cycling TV’s offices are just like Scrooge McDuck’s vault, and everybody who works there is too busy having money fights to fix Kunubu’s bright yellow text problem.