Photo courtesy of Dwayne Yancey

Feast your eyes on the offbeat picture on the left.  What strange mind would devise a movie featuring a 300-pound man in a goldfish costume, riding a BMX bike in Roanoke County’s Green Hill Park?

John Waters?

Not exactly. The answer is my newspaper colleague Dwayne Yancey, who moonlights as a playwright/scriptwriter, and Hank Ebert, who’s a film director and videographer.

They’re cohorts in the production of the short film, “The Secret Lives of Goldfish,” which will make its world premiere Friday night (7 p.m.) at the Bike Shorts Film Festival 2013 (more here) at the Taubman Museum of Art. Read more »

SourtoeCocktailClub.com

By Mark Jurkevich

Mexico’s Mezcal, with its famous worm, is no match for our northern neighbor’s novelty drink – the Sourtoe Cocktail. The former comes with one worm in each bottle; the latter comes with one amputated human toe in each drink.

Dawson City’s Downtown Hotel, in the heart of Yukon Territory, has been proudly serving the Sourtoe Cocktail since 1973, when local riverboat captain Dick “River Rat” Stevenson found a severed big toe in a pickle jar.

Stevenson’s original rules for joining the Sourtoe Cocktail Club still ring in the late night hours at the hotel saloon – “You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, but the lips have gotta touch the toe.”

The purist version of the cocktail is very simple – Yukon Jack whiskey is poured into a rocks glass. The bartender then fishes out a human toe from a dry salt pack and drops it into the glass. If you successfully down the drink, bottoms-up style, so that the toe ends up resting on your lips, you become a member of the Sourtoe Cocktail Club. Read more »

Amin Eshaiker | Wikimedia Commons

You know those kindly and smiling retail employees who stand near the exit door and check your receipts to make sure you’re not stealing something?

They’ve demanded it of me at Kroger (Towers) and at Best Buy and it happens every time at Sam’s Club. They want you to prove you just bought the item that you now own, before they let you go.

It’s particularly nettlesome if you’re buying one or two items at Sam’s Club, which I do on occasion. Because not only do you have to line up and show your card to get into the joint, you have to line up to pay, and THEN you often have to line up to leave. With your own, recently purchased property.

And if you’re No. 9 in a line of people with loaded carts, who have bought dozens of items, and you’re carrying one, it’s particularly aggravating.

It never occurred to me, until I read this post on The Consumerist, which says there’s a Virginia law that says customers aren’t required to show a receipt for items they have purchased in order to get out of a retailer. It makes sense, though. You own the thing. Why should you have to prove that?

But that doesn’t stop the retailers from trying to get you to cough up the receipt.

If you feel the same way, you may want to read the tale of Rick (below) and his experience in a Virginia Wal-mart, after he had just purchased a TV and was trying to get out of the store. Read more »

Elena DeRosa

One reason I like Elena DeRosa is she’s a sharp cookie. Naturally, she viewed today’s column as an opportunity to chime in on her blog, in a post with the title of the headline, above.

In which Elena writes about:

“He comes from Binghamton and works for the Roanoke Times. What does he know?” she writes. “Please do not cancel your show in Roanoke. Some of us transplants need to hear another New York accent and a joke that doesn’t have “Y’all” in it.”

To which I would add: What does she know? She’s a Patti Smith fan who did cartwheel when she found a Roanoke Valley store that sells Breakstone Whipped butter.

I doubt Seinfeld will cancel the show, Elena. He’s already found enough suckers to fill half the Roanoke Performing Arts Theatre at the Civic Center — at $72 and $82 a head. Read more »

Rob Humphrey's stripped down, 4-saw-blade power tool drag racer. More pix of the racing machines are below. | Shot by Dan

One of life’s necessary chores is fighting boredom and ennui and we are all responsible to ourselves for that.

But every now and then, someone comes along to give us a hand — like Jerry Falwell or Gypsy Rose Lee or River Laker.

The latest helpers in that arena aren’t nearly so controversial. But in a good-natured and American can-do way, their pastime is no less perverse. And they’re about to make a big splash in the Star City, courtesy of Festival in the Park.

We’re talking about Power Tool Drag Racing.

When you think about it, that’s a weird bunch of words to string together. Allow them to sink in for just a few seconds. The imagination reels.

In sporting terms, Power Tool Drag Racing is a burlesque that’s equal parts drag-strip machismo, mechanical genius and tool-shed nerd. It’s kind of like a low-rent version of that TV show “Robot Wars.”

Except: The participants are racing rather than trying to destroy each other. The “motors” are circular saws, grinders, belt sanders and whatnot. And they’re tethered to highly charged, extra-long AC extension cords, rather than powered by puny DC batteries. In some cases, the “wheels” are actual saw blades.

In keeping with the drag racing theme, there are no difficult radio remote controls for racers to master. Racers have only a simple switch to throw. The races take place on parallel 80-foot long, 12-inch-wide wooden tracks, edged by 2×4 wood studs that keep the machines on course. Read more »

Photo courtesy Stratton Delany

The 2nd year will be bigger, better, organizers say

The photo on the left was from last April’s  inaugural Twilight bicycle races in downtown Roanoke the same afternoon/evening as the Blue Ridge Marathon.

Well, the organizers are doing it again this year, on April 21, and it’s going to be even bigger, with 300 likely racers,  many of them top pros, riding a downtown circuit course. The total purse is at least $7,500.

If you’ve ever seen downtown bike racing, it’s exciting stuff. But it’s impossible to pull off without lots of effort from volunteers who erect fencing, serve as course marshals and help with after-the-event breakdown. I volunteered last year and it was a lot of fun.

To get on that volunteers list, send an email to volunteer@roanoketwilight.com

Here’s a breakdown of what’s happening  from organizer Stratton Delany:

• Sports Event – Last year’s winner Ben Zawacki is one of the top professional criterium racers in the US (he’s already leading the prestigious USA Crits series). He and other professional athletes will be racing on our streets.
• Community Event – This year’s event will include outdoor dining/drinking at three mainstay downtown restaurants: Macado’s,  Blue 5 and Martin’s. Blue 5 and Martins are both extending their outdoor dining areas to give spectators a place to enjoy the race. Both are starting at 3 PM (2 hours before the race) to give the event a street festival atmosphere.
• Business – The event will bring in 300+ racers (generally affluent) to the area who will be staying in hotels, spending money in restaurants, etc.  It’s a great way to show off our city.

The volunteer coordinator is Warren Schmizzi. Give him a shout at the email address above.

Donald Johnson built a reindeer out of plywood that almost stands as tall as his house. | By Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

Donald Johnson, 76,  is a retired mailman from northern New Jersey. He and his wife, Beverly, moved down here in the 1990s to escape high taxes and be closer to family.

The Johnsons live in the Preston Park area off Williamson Road, in a humble brick bungalow on Yardley Drive.

It’s a bit less humble these days.

On November 20, Donald Johnson erected what may the largest lawn ornament in town — at least so far.

It’s a 16-foot-tall painted-white reindeer, cut out of sheets of plywood, held together via tab-and-slot construction, plus five steel lag bolts.

The 16-point buck is bedecked with a red bow, and held in place with wires attached to 18-inch-long steel stakes taht Johnson pounded into the ground. He added more stabilizing stakes and wires to it last week when we had brisk wind.

It doesn’t yet have a name. But people sure are noticing. It’s almost as tall as his house.

“I don’t think there’s anything like it in Roanoke,” he told me Friday. He can say that again. Read more »

One of the more unusual entrants in the 32 Annual Virginia State Championship Chili Cook-Off was Volvo Truck's Chili & Waffles Team. The guy making the waffles told me it was the weirdest food combo they could dream up. (But the waffles were good, too).

Congratulations are in order today to the Roanoke Valley Harley Owners Group.

They make some killer chili. It’s hot stuff in more ways than one.

You wouldn’t know this if you weren’t one of the 5,000 or so folks Saturday who made it down to Salem Avenue in downtown Roanoke for the 32nd annual Virginia State Championship Chili Cook-Off.

The popular event is a fundraiser for Greenvale School, a nonprofit daycare center in Northwest Roanoke that serves working families. Jenny Lee, the school’s development director, estimated Greenvale raised at least $30,000 through the event.

Among 27 cook teams who chopped, browned, seasoned and stirred up hundreds of gallons of spicy meat stew and salsa, the HOG’s White Knuckle Chili took top honors in the blind-judging competition for the red chili category.

The HOGs also claimed the People’s Choice Award (they’ve won that 11 years running), which means they got the most votes by folks who attended the event.

The coveted judged title carries a $1,000 prize and entry into the World’s Championship Chili Cookoff, which is kind of like the Academy Awards of one-pot cooking

Chuckle at that redneck-chef notion if you like. But this is a serious business, overseen by the International Chili Society, which dates back to the late 1960s and claims to be the world’s largest food competition/festival sanctioning organization.

Its members’ passion for spicy meat stew is as blistering hot as the infamous “ghost chili,” reputedly the most fiery pepper on Earth.

The cooks who showed up at the Railside Plaza early Saturday morning do not take their chili lightly. The HOG group, for example, invested hundreds of hours of labor by 40 to 50 people (they started prepping the night before) and $500 in ingredients and supplies to turn out 40 gallons of chili. Read more »

Zach Casey, 12, carries his bike over -- and under -- some trees that fell across the Greenbrier Trail in West Virginia during Wednesday night's storm. The storms in West Virginia didn't cause anything near the havoc that happened in Alabama, Georgia or Virginia. But thousands of West Virginians were still without power late by late Thursday afternoon, the conclusion of our 4-day, 112-mile mountain biking/camping trip.

We’re back!

Zach and I left Monday on a 4-day trip along the Greenbrier Trail in West Virginia. We started in Caldwell, WVa., just west of White Sulphur Springs, and rode up to Marlinton and then back to the car. We finished Thursday afternoon.

The plan had been to camp each night in beautiful trail-side primitive campsites. We camped the first two nights but a park ranger warned us about the severe weather slated for Wednesday night, so rented a cabin in Renick, W.Va instead. That turned out to be a great move.

The trail is an old C&O Railroad logging, passenger and freight line that was in operation through 1978. It’s 77 miles long and stretches from Caldwell to Cass, W.Va. We rode to Marlinton (milepost 56) then turned around and rode back. Here’s an article I wrote about the trail back in the 1990s.

What follows are pictures from our adventure. Zach’s been listening to my bike trip stories for years (I’ve been bike tripping since 1976). This was his inaugural bike trip — and he’s already planning the next one. Read more »

A tidal bore is when an incoming tide meets an opposing current, and in a few places around the world it creates low-level waves  that can be surfed for amazing distances.

Cook Inlet in Alaska is one of those. Check out the cool video. More on tidal bores here.