Toes nailed

Crankmeister has a sorry tail to tell about his fr!gging toe nails.  Common problem in the ole crank-scene getting fungus under your nailies.  And it has finally got me, crank-lovers.  It started like it was just a bit of dirt or something, and now whatever is living in my Evolutions has made four nails look like they are 100% bird sh!t.  Gets worse and worse.  After some discussion, the lads and me decide said Evolutions got to be inincerated, which was like hearing I have to sell my alloy wheel hubs or something.  Then some girlie at the wall overheard me talking about it, and she just piped up that there was this nail varnish right, that doesn’t look like it but will cover up all manner of.  The others thought it was effing hilarious, but it started nagging away at me.  So I googled and found some stuff and thank Christ it came in one of those unmarked packets they usually put my porn in.  Anyway, I painted it on, and it didn’t look too bad at first.  Sort of dull and blank.  But I reckoned I’d better to a coat on all of them otherwise I’d have one wierd toe.  Wait two hours it says, so I got on the sofa with remote-control footrest and stuck Witness on repeat on the laptop.  (Obviously praying no b!gger came visiting as I’d have some serious f!cking explaining to do sat there).  Already having got through a six-pack by then I dozed off halfway through first ascent number 8, and when I woke up my f!cking nails were shiny-sparkly.  Jesus FC.  Excuse my French.  So then I had to call in sick the next day, and buy some fr!gging nail varnish remover.  Me!  The CrankMesiter.  Looking this f!cking weedy !sshole pharmacist in the eye who was thinking God knows what as I handed over the three quid or whatever.  Anyway, damage sorted, kind of.  Luckily I haven’t seen that girl again, although what the hell would I tell her anyway I don’t know.  So, now it’s back to the old yellow-nails.  Team Crank consensus is that this probably means that toe-sucking is probably out.  One of them told me there’s some pill or something that will do it, but I reckon the daft !ss is confusing that with contraception.

Gaston=gassed on!!

Hey did you ever notice that?!  I can’t believe I only just clocked it.  F!cking hilarious.  Came to me this weekend when me and the Prof from Team Crank were projecting this 7a warm-up and I was belaying, minding my own business, and my mate was stuck trying to get out of this rest and he said ‘I need to be..’ and he went quiet, straining like, then he said ‘gaston’.  Brilliant.  Gettit?  ‘I need to be gassed on.’  I tell you what I f!cking nearly died laughing and almost dropped my can of Coke right there and then.  My whole body was straining to get out ‘I’ll !ffing well gass on you if you want it that much mate!’, but I was doubled up laughing and snorting.  The entire rest of the day we were at it saying ‘gassed on’.  And to cap it all, this geezer and his girl passed by watching us warming up a couple of hours later and we got chatting about the sequence, and every time he said ‘gaston’ we cracked up.  I tried to explain, but we got the giggles again and the old voice sounded like I was in pain, being strangled by my harness or something.  They didn’t seem to dig the joke and shuffled off.  Oh well.  Some people.  Gaston.  Gassed-on.  It’s even making me f!cking laugh just writing it.  Brilliant.  It’s like someone decided to call a climbing move a farton.  As in, fart-on.  Although I guess it’s not quite the same, because it’s sort of in the past isn’t it.  So it would be a fartedon.

Gaston

Unlaced warm-ups

Crankmeister has read most of the top climbing books, and they are big on stuff like setting your climbing goals.  Obviously, my main climbing goal is to get laid, but apart from that, I reckon that I want to get into the unlaced warm-ups club.  You know the guys I am talking about.  They are onto those holds without their laces done up, and they are sending out seriously cool vibes.  Like:  ‘This is so f!cking below my grade I could actually do it in moon-boots, let alone climbing shoes,’, or ‘I’m such a laid-back hippy dude in tune with the rock that I don’t even think about this laces stuff.  I’m surprised I even bothered to put on my !ffing clothes I am so out of it.’

Unlaced warm-ups is the biz

Anyway, as McCleod constantly bangs on in his stuff, you don’t get anything without a serious lot of hard work, so I am going to dedicate myself to mastering (sorry should have been meistering) the art of warming up without tying your laces.  This morning my local was unusually quiet so I could have a go without any punters clocking what I was up to, but to be honest it was a total disaster. Trod on the lace on the crash mat on the way to the start hold and went !ss over t!t, whacking me head on some stupid V0 hold as I fell.  Lesson learned!  Even the CM with his effing PhD at the climbing university of life has got stuff to learn:  next time I will be lacing up for the walk across the mat, then unlacing for the warm-up!  Sorted!

7 ways for RockF!cks to get their !ffing act together

Thing I hate about those bl!!ding Rockfax guides is they miss all the important stuff off.  First, they should have directions to great bushes where you can get down and hide a really serious cr!p without going too far from the bloody route.  The other week I was walking for ages trying to find somewhere.  And basically what you want is to waddle off no further than it takes so you don’t smell it while you are climbing.   But it doesn’t stop there, does it.  In Team Crank we thought up this great name for them:  Rock-F!cks!  Not bad, eh?!  Some other great suggestions:  put little blobs on the route maps to show you where you put the eff!ing gear.  That would save time so you could get more people through the route.  Other suggestions:  make a list of the best 7a wam-ups to look great on.

Rockfax could grey out the easy stuff and slap on a sign like this

Any more comments for them while we are at it?  If those guys are reading, the Crankmeister is well up for having a parley about this and doing a joint thingy.  ‘Crankmeister’s Rock-F!cks guide to seriously hard-sh!t climbing’.  What about that?  A rock guide with all the weedy-!ssed stuff under 7a cut out, maybe with those routes just greyed out on the topo, with a girl sign on them or something.

That isn’t 7 ways for them to get their act together, but believe me I’ve got far more than 7 up my sleeve.

Sandstone trouble? Wire brush the f!cker

Me and Team Crank – working name only – went down for a bit of the old slap and scrape (code for sandstone) last weekend.  Some of that stuff is h!rd, even if it’s all bloody top-roping.  [Some locals have the wierdest effing ideas about climbing ethics if you ask me].  Anyway, we were getting stuck on our 6a warmup (that’s English money, thickies, in case you are wondering) and one of our trusted gang who calls himself ‘The Prof’ got this wire brush out that he has and totally sorted this useless sloper, so that there was a lovely bit of something behind the back of it.  Genius!  We did a bit of soul-searching about it, and in the end decided to leave it at that.  Except for gouging a couple of bits out further up where there are tricky feet.  And another bit near the top where you feel like you are going to slip the f!ck off the route without a bit of a tickle for the left hand.

Give it a bit of this!

Anyway, no harm done is my feeling about it all.  You can’t see it from the bottom.  Wire brushing is cool too because they weigh less.  Have you tried doing trad on lead with an effing hammer and chisel?  It adds at least three goddamned grades if you ask me.  No-one remembers that when they are on their high horse about chiselling, do they?!

Team sperm!

Can you believe it, there is this bunch of dudes who have called themselves team f!cking sperm.  They are obviously digging the CM as they are linking to me.   I wish me and the other crag lads had a effing brill name like that.  We’ve all got our own names, but we haven’t got a group name.  Although you know me as the crankmeister, they don’t like that name as it sounds too foreign, so to them I’m the crank-master, which if you ask me doesn’t have the same cool ring to it.  Anyway, there’s also first-clip-big-d!ck, after one of our lot who is actually a pretty sh!t climber but is always up for risking his neck on the first clip while we down a couple of cans of coke.  He tends to bail out after that, understandably as sometimes those clips are higher than the f!cking Eiffel Tower.  We used to take the piss about it, but in his defence he cites pace-makers in Atheletics, who do the first lap and jog off, knackered, to get a beer or whatever.

Sorry, got a bit lost there.  I was talking about the lads’ nick names.  There’s Little-Willy-W!nker;  no-one has actually seen it, so we don’t know, but that’s why he gets the name.  It’s not really a climbing name, but there you go.  And there’s clipstick Cliff, who isn’t called Cliff.  But one day he emailed on UKC for a climbing partner and this geezer who said he was called Cliff mailed back and Cliff (that’s our Cliff) wrote ‘f!ck off out of it you smart !ss c!ck s!cker’ presuming that Cliff was a false name just designed to take the Mickey.  Anyway it wasn’t, Cliff was his real f!cking name.  Can you believe it?  Our Cliff was totally apologetic when he realised, but the guy got the hump and wouldn’t climb with him.  The other bit of Clipstick Cliff’s name is rubbish really, as, to be honest, we are all at it now.  Well, team sperm would have been the perfect name for us, but I guess that’s taken.  Next time we are going at one of our 7a warmups we’ll have to sort out a proper cool sounding name.  Team Crank would suit me.   Or maybe Team The Crank.  Any suggestions?

[Added later]This is an actual f!cking sperm unless google is tricking me.  Amazing isn’t it.  Surely can’t be as big as that though.

PS

What I mean is, although you’d have two odd legs, you’d be with your latest mermaid reeled in from the v2s at the wall and she’d say ‘hang on, you’ve got two odd legs’, and you’d be like ‘yep, but believe me, there will be no abseiling off the end of this’.  For the sake of argument, and, to be honest, to cut out the annoying fifty f!cking comments I’d have to moderate if I didn’t make this clear, I’m supposing you don’t already have Graham legs, in which case you’d still have two matching legs if you swapped one of his for one of yours.

No arms again.

Just on that, it isn’t the rich that bothers me.  All power to them, I’d like some of that, with all the cool gear there is to spend it on.  But it’s the arms.  I don’t mind thinking about guys with no legs and massive arms.  That’s fine.  But the other way round?  Nope, that’s not a thought I like to have popping into my mind at all.  I mean, if God told you you had to have two of Dave Graham’s limbs, you’d definitely take your allotment in legs, wouldnt’ you.  Having Sharma legs and Graham arms would be a disaster.  You’d never be able to take your effing shirt off.  But Sharma arms and Graham legs and you’d still get respect.  Acually, maybe the Sharm would be even better if he had Graham legs:  Has anyone discussed that? And: Hang On, That’s Not F!cking All.  What I’m saying here misses that Dave might actually be seriously well hung.  In which case if you really did have to take two of his limbs, you’d have a dilemma on your hands, because at some point you might be tempted to go for one of his legs and his you know wh!t, despite all the problems that would throw up.

The Tete?

‘The genou’ – Cranmeister’s term for using your knee when you can’t get your effing foot high enough, scored a goal with this Norwegian chick.  Got me thinking about times I’ve ended up using my head too.  Sometimes you get desparate to wedge yourself in and there isn’t anything else.  I used to call those ‘Tets’, (Frenchies call their head la tete), but if you try calling it that people can’t help mishearing and think you are saying ‘tits’, which gets confusing, especially if after another few beers, you do want to say ‘tits’.  I suppose the obvious thing to call them is ‘headers’, but then football has already bagged that, and I don’t like thinking about those rich guys with massive legs and no arms.

Crank the monkey

Don’t know about you, because you may not yet have graduated from the school-of-bad-man-climbing like I have, but do you ever find yourself pulling through a move so goddamned cool that you just want to get off belay, duck behind a bush and fire up the starter motor right there and then?  Course, it would never actually happen like that. Not just because of the privacy question, unless you were one of those self-belay maniacs.  But because by the time you’d got your thighs out of your harness, the engine would have cooled right down.  Come to think of it, they should make a harness for this kind of market, with a velcro thingy that you could just whip off for those champagne moments.  That would be something.  And let me tell you, if there are any gear manufacturers out there getting a total tent pole on about the idea of a harness like that, I am well up for collaborating.  There’d be some safety issues to deal with.  Like the bad things that can happen between velcro and the hair down under.  But there must be some Shoreditch design geezer who could sort that one.  I ‘spose there is that bullsh!t about that stuff affecting performance.  Remember the world cup where the wives weren’t allowed in?  Personally I think that’s rubbish.  Whenever I’ve had a bit of private time I always feel like I could flash 8a right there and then, though I haven’t actually tested it out yet.