“Mad Dog”? “Foaming Rant”? Yeah, and I’m a “Young Professional” with a “Promising Career”. Patrick O’Grady, your latest tripe has got to be the most weak-kneed excuse for an editorial since Mike Imrem christened Ricky Williams the next Jacques Anquetil. In all honesty, what was the point of this Friday’s rant? That it snows in Colorado? Did that surprise you? Had you really lived there all those years without ever seeing the license plates?

I used to like you, Jon Vaughters. You seemed like a nice guy with great references; one of the few riders everyone could believe really was clean. But then you came out saying you never saw any evidence of doping during your time at US Postal. That didn’t lessen you any in my eyes, per se, until you ran your mouth to your old friend Frankie Andreu about everyone’s doping regimens. Of course, that was all “embellishments and BS”, right? Sure, until L’Equipe published some excerpts a few days back; now you claim it’s all second-hand information.

Eurosport reports that Ivan Basso has been officially cleared to race. Note how they’ve sloppily insisted that Basso “served out a four-month suspension having been linked with the Operation Puerto doping probe”. That’s the biggest syntactic dry-hump since Super Bowl XXXVIII’s “wardrobe malfunction”. Using the verb “served” would imply that Basso’s suspension was a predetermined sentence, handed down by some sort judicial body after a legitimate trial. And it was nothing of the kind.

This report really begins a few years back, when Steve Weller was converting Amy Wallace’s old Specialized Allez to a campus single-speed (an idea popularized among the Hanoverans by yours truly). I was aghast to see that Steve had shelled out 30 bucks for a singulator (the existing – that is, free – rear derailleur would have worked fine with some limit screw adjustment), yet hadn’t sprung for a 5-dollar BMX cog, instead opting to use the 15t sprocket from Amy’s existing cassette: