Recycling RAGBRAIEvery summer for almost 20 years,...

Recycling RAGBRAI

Every summer for almost 20 years, Des Moines Register reporter and demon cyclist John Karras has been leading bike riders on a merry chase across Iowa.

It started in the early ‘70s, with Karras, now sixtysomething, offering to pedal across the state and do a story for the paper, thereby getting the Register to pay his expenses and not dock him for vacation time.

“Boondoggle” was a word that sprang quickly to some of his (disgustingly jealous) fellow reporters’ lips, but the smug Karras didn’t know what he was riding into.

In 1973, the paper decided to let other people ride along with Karras on his adventure, thereby giving birth to what has become the RAGBRAI--the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa--which this year has drawn an international field of 7,000, including Shape magazine’s Suzanne Schlosberg of Canoga Park and several other Valley residents.

Schlosberg, a writer and demon cyclist, fell right into the Karras tradition by talking her publication into paying her expenses and not docking her for vacation time.

The ride--which started Sunday and will conclude tomorrow--is taking bikers through such garden spots as Missouri Valley, Beebeetown, Atlantic, Adair, Casey, Stuart, Earlham, Winterset, Hanley, St. Charles and Lacona. It is divided into segments of 50 to 70 miles per day. This year’s course is considered the hilliest ever attempted, according to Karras, who bristles at the idea that Iowa is flat and that he must have included every bump in the state on the course.

After each day of riding, the 7,000 spent riders spend evenings camping out in the great outdoors, or camping in with the families along the route who will have them.

An invigorating wholesomeness is the impression you get from the advance material.

The reality, according to Schlosberg, is that large numbers of the pedalers stagger out of the sack by 4 a.m. so they can ride like maniacs to the next town, drink beer all day, carouse and get rowdy.

Karras does not dispute this shocking accusation, in fact he seems to be pleased by it.

“This is not the Tour de France we’re throwing here, you understand,” he said.

Seriously, Folks

This item is addressed to women who care terribly about the condition of their nails.

Judy Stevenson is giving a class in acrylics this evening at Pierce College in Woodland Hills in which she will teach you how to do to yourself what you must pay up to $10 a nail to have done to you in a salon.

Stevenson of Colton says there is a $25 registration fee and a $15 material fee for the class; both may be paid at the door.

Stevenson also said that men are always welcome in her class, although not many take it.

She can’t say why measuring-mad women will put all manner of foreign substances on their nails, up to and including Crazy Glu, in an effort to lengthen them, but men do not participate in this activity.

On the other hand, she does know that the “Guinness Book of World Records” listed the longest unadulterated fingernail in the world as more than two feet long. (Try to put on panty hose with that.)

Stevenson got a little huffy when asked why a manicurist had to be imported from Colton to teach the class, when there are about 350 employed and unemployed nail nippers in the neighborhood, but she said she’s been asked to teach classes from Ventura to San Diego and everywhere in between.

Lights Out

The Assn. of Town Watch in Wynnewood, Pa., has developed an increasingly popular program to combat crime.

The program, says the association, is designed to heighten crime and drug awareness, generate support for current anti-crime programs, strengthen neighborhood spirit and police/community relations, and send a message to criminals that neighborhoods nationwide are against them.

One suggestion is to have block parties or cookouts to get to know your neighbors better.

(Then you are all in one place and the robbers can go house to house.)

Another is to sit outside your residence between 8 and 10 p.m. one night a week with your front porch light on.

(Practitioners of the drive-by should love that.)

Gimme Money

There are 3,000 accountants in the San Fernando Valley but try not to let that get you down.

According to a recent poll by TransWorld Bank, CPAs may crunch your numbers but they won’t cut you off.

For a month or two.

Or maybe never.

In a somewhat informal telephone survey of 100 Valley CPAs, 34% of respondents said they never cut off a client who failed to pay his bill on time.

Others said they cut people off after one month (3%), two months (5%), three months (20%), six months (8%), one year (15%) or never (15%).

About 50% said they might put a client on a cash-on-delivery-only basis, and 15% said they accept Visa and MasterCard.

Everyone, CPAs included, is struggling with the recession, but Sid Weiss, a Woodland Hills CPA, said he was surprised that the percentage of COD clients was so high.

On the other hand, Pete Satuloff, another Woodland Hills CPA, said he was surprised it wasn’t higher.

Overheard

“I want my margarita thick. Like a Slurpee.”

--Man to a waiter at La Parrilla restaurant in Northridge