Understatement of the week

CNN.com is reporting a story about Dubya pardoning Randall Leece Deal, who was convicted on moonshining charges in the 1960s. (Hey, it's not as if he's in charge of a war or anything. What else does the president have to do between readings of "My Pet Goat?")

Deal played a small role in the 1972 film "Deliverance," which CNN says was "about four Atlanta businessmen who have unpleasant encounters with locals during a North Georgia canoe trip."

Unpleasant encounters? Well, maybe for those good ol' Georgia boys at CNN in Atlanta.

Personally, I'd say gettin' ass-raped by a grimy, toothless hillbilly would be freakin' horrifying, not "unpleasant."

When I'm reminded of that movie, I often think of a ride I once did outside Los Alamos, N.M., when we encountered a pretty inbred-looking dude in a battered old truck on a remote forest road.

One of the guys in our group, T.J., started nervously yammering about how the guy probably had guns and could have raped all three of us.

Mountain bikers tend to talk about a lot of gross things—saddle sores, bowel movements, exposed bones—but no regular guy wants to pedal through the woods with another guy who won't shut up about the possibility of gettin' buggered during a bike ride.

Especially when the yammering guy is already known for being so homophobic that some of us thought he might be protesting a little too much, if ya know what I mean. After a while, Jeremy and I started thinking T.J. might actually be hoping to run into Scary Pickup Guy again.

I started finding excuses to not ride with T.J. after that. The dude was creeping me out.

Besides, he didn't take care of his bike.

His brakes squealed like a pig.