This Beautiful Monster

By Mike Ferrentino

“The time has come, the walrus said
To speak of many things
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax
Of cabbages and kings
Of why the sea is boiling hot
And whether pigs have wings...”

Typical Mike on a typical day. Really.

Many moons have passed since I’ve written anything resembling a column here on the ol’ interweb. Used to be something almost regular. But then things happened - work, life, more work, and plenty of change inside the soul crushing drunken machinery known as Primedia – and words for the website were few and far between.

Somewhere along the way, Vernon took over the thankless task of trying to steward this mess, and has been diligently posting news, videos, stories, columns, product reviews, archiving old magazine tests and generally stuffing this beast of a site with more fresh and up to the minute readability than just about anywhere else on the web. And it’s high time some of us on the print side of the info-divide stepped up and began contributing again, before Vernon has a stroke.

So, that said, here’s hoping that this can become something almost regular again, a monthly or more speakeasy here at the three dot lounge...

Three Dot Lounge...
I think that phrase was first coined by Herb Caen (but it might have been Walter Winchell, and may not have really taken off until someone like Jon Carrol ran with it. Hell, I don’t really know), who would string his daily columns of often non-sequitir observations about life as a dinosaur in San Francisco together with ellipses between thoughts. No desire at this end of things to spend the next 50 years chugging out daily platitudes about what I overheard at Bimbo’s 365 Club, but at the same time, I have to admit I kinda dig the form. You can cover a lot of ground in the three dot lounge...

It’s a Bold New Interweb...
Vernon, while packing the site to the gills with fresh content, and working his real day job, and walking his dogs, and riding his bike, and chopping down his trees, and preparing for the impending neon King Kong standing on his back of fatherhood, has also done a subtle but effective cleanup and redesign of the site. It’s a whole lot less cluttered, less redundant, and much cleaner and easier to navigate than it used to be. Now, all we have to do is try and tie the site and the print mag a little more effectively together.

They are two entirely different beasts, with entirely different uses, different readerships, and different roles to play. Print media is just plain getting slaughtered these days when it tries to keep up with the web in terms of disseminating news, while a website is still a difficult thing to curl up on the couch and nurse a coffee/beer/quart of Haagen Das with. As mentioned, different. But still both distinctly BIKE. As such, we’ll be fine tuning this mix going forward, and playing to the strengths of each. Feel free to tell us what we’re doing right, or wrong…

The Curse of BIKE…
Right about the time that Petersen Publications bought Surfer Publications several years ago, and in so doing started a snowball of absolutely miserable corporate takeovers and buyouts that is still going on today, we started joking about being cursed. There were flameouts, deaths, and a number of bizarre heartbreaks and disintegrations that lended credence to our collective superstitions. Last year, coming in as editor, I tried real hard to ignore it all. But now, on the eve of shipping what might be our second biggest issue ever, it feels like the crows of doom have come home to roost again.

Diamond Lou, who really controls everything, is out at a wedding in Panama this week, so I have to pretend I know what I’m doing. Meanwhile, our production manager, SparkleHorse, after weeks of increasing dizzy spells, abruptly called in on Monday to announce she was taking a four to six week leave of absence. Out of the blue. Minutes after that, our publisher, The Lighthouse, had to leave for the day after news of some pretty heinous personal tragedy came and roped him under. That night, I was giving our assistant photo editor, More-Gan, a ration of shit for peeling out at about 6:30, instead of pulling his usual fourteen-hour day. He looked fine and cheerily laughed about catching a train. Didn’t show up to work Tuesday. Tuesday night his girlfriend called to tell us that he was in the hospital having his appendix out.

I feel like Sgt. Phil Esterhaus in an old episode of “Hill Street Blues”, trying to talk a room full of street-weary old hands through another morning roll call – “Hey. HEY! Remember, let’s be careful out there.”

And I have no freaking idea how we are supposed to get the magazine out the door this month. To all my troops, the ones here, the ones in Panama, the ones in Arcata, the ones in Hospital, the ones alive and dead and the ones who came before me, I propose a toast – “Make it through this and there will be fresh horses and free whiskey for all of us!” Or something like that. Until next time, here are three dots…