Happenings

Warning! There's not a whole lot of bike related content below. I had a 50 mile + road ride planned for last Saturday, but the 2 hours of super charged riding at Lincoln Woods on Friday (not to mention the beers at the Fez) landed me in a near coma until 2 pm on Saturday. As Stacy put it "I don't think I've ever seen you quite like this". Indeed. So instead of riding I got my shit together, and we headed over to McCoy with Bruceapallooza himself to see the Bosstones/Dropkick Murphy's show.

There were a lot of people there, the paper reported that there were 10,000+ tickets sold. Pretty friggin' crazy! Anyway, the stage was set up in the outfield, and there was some temporary flooring laid down to protect the grass. Someone thought it was a good idea to sell the legions of "punch me I'm Irish" dudes beer in plastic bottles. Not too surprisingly an impromptu bottle toss/fight erupted prior to the Bosstones set. While it was slightly amusing to watch, it further cemented my well known feelings on the stupidity of most people.

So we dodged bottles and hung out near the front while waiting for the show to start. The Bosstones opened with Kinder Words, and then they blazed through an hour plus set (they did slow things down to bring Dicky's Mom out for her birthday). I'm not going to include the whole set list, but they did play some great songs that they haven't been playing a lot since the reunion. These included Illegal Left, Toxic Toast, Devil's Night Out and You Gotta Go!. The initial reaction from the crowd was kind of tepid, save the action from the already drunk 300lb fools seemingly out to crush kids just trying to have a good time. Watching big dolts in green Celtics shirts, and a few with Irish flag face paint, mow down much smaller people was kinda lame. Luckily the big goons got all tuckered out Clubber Lang style, and everyone resumed having fun after a while. All of the above is why I prefer to see bands in a smaller venue, but I'll take what I can get and had a great time anyway.

The really nice pictures above and below are courtesy of Mike Gaughan of Whatever Magazine and are used with his permission. He takes some really nice pics in general, check out the link above. Thanks Mike!

We moved to the stands to watch the DKM show. I hadn't seen them in ages, and they seem to have a whole thing going for themselves that works. Not really my kind of thing, but good for them. We made our exit during Barroom Heroes (one of the few DKM tunes I know) and escaped ahead of most of the crowd.

I did get out to Foxboro on Sunday for a good ride on the Schwinn. Rigid 26" riding definitely works me over now that I'm a pansy 29er rider. The beating I took on the trail far exceeded that which I received at the show on Saturday, though both were slightly less than what Margaret dished out Friday night. All things considered it's certainly no worse than the beatdowns local racoons are know to bestow upon my favorite bartender, so I'd say we're even..