If Mayor De Blasio (or PETA) Took On Santa Claus....

I simply cannot make an animal do something I wouldn't do myself.  It's just not in me.  I am reminded of that every time I see Max and Marlee dozing on the couch whenever I go to work!

So, when New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio said, on the day he took office, that he would ban the horse-drawn carriages tourists love, I was rooting for him to succeed--even though, deep down, I knew he wouldn't.  And, of course, he didn't:  In this city, a politician needs the endorsement of the Teamsters Union--of which the carriage operators are members--in order to get elected or stay in office.  

Also, there are just too many other people, not all of them tourists, who simply could no more imagine the area around Central Park without the horses and carriages than they could imagine Santa without his sled and reindeer.

Speaking of which:  What if the amimal rights activists (with whom I am in sympathy 99 percent of the time) mounted a campaign to stop Santa from driving his airborne bovines?  How would he bring all of those eagerly-awaited gifts to kids of all ages all over the world?

Hmm...Perhaps he could try this:

Hmm...Maybe Mayor de Blasio tried to ban the wrong animals.  From Life Of Bikes.

The question is, of course:  Who would pedal those bikes for him?  And could he find a cyclist with a bright, shiny nose to lead the pack?

For that matter:  What race leaders sported bright red noses instead of the maillot jaune or maglia rosa?

Wearing The Maillot Jaune On The Streets Of San Francisco

Long before he was Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas was Inspector Steve Keller in The Streets of San Francisco.

I now realize that the chief reason why I liked the show so much during its run was that it looked "authentic".  At least it seemed that way to me at the time, before I had ever set foot in "The City Over The Rainbow".  Even in my adolescence, I could tell that the acting was mediocre and the writing was contrived or just plain silly. (NYPD Blue was much better on both counts.)  But it sure was fun to watch all of those chases with the bay and the bridge in the background.

I haven't been to SFO in a while, but from what I hear, it's changed a lot.  Whatever it's like now, I imagine few street scenes can match what's in this video called, appropriately enough, "The Streets of San Francisco".




The young dude in the maillot jaune--OK, yellow T-shirt--really got my attention!

Happy Solstice!

In my half of the world (Who owns the other half?;-), it's the first day of winter, a.k.a., the Winter Solstice.

For my dear readers in Australia and other places in the other half, it's your first day of summer.

Where I live, we'll have about nine hours of daylight today.  Now, some of you don't think its such a short day--and with good reason.  I know my readers in Scotland and Finland (I won't drop any names here!) aren't getting much daylight. This morning, on the public radio station, the weather reporter mentioned northern Finland, where--if I recall correctly--the sun rose after 11 am and set before 2 pm.

Does your Winter Solstice Ride look like this?

Some organizations have Winter Solstice rides.  I've never participated in one--at least with any organization.  Once in my youth, however, a few of my riding buddies and I went on a ride that began with sunrise and ended with sunset on Solstice Day.  We did a century (in miles)--which, especially in the condition we were in, wasn't that difficult, even with all of the stops for hot cocoa with peppermint schnapps.  With each successive stop, the ratio of schnapps to cocoa increased.  I think each of us brought schnapps.  One of us, I forget which, brought his in one of those TA flasks we all hope someone will put in our Christmas stockings.

Great for carrying Schnapps in your jersey pocket.  But I'm told that cognac goes even better in it.

I'm not going to do anything like that day, in part because I didn't wake up until well after sunrise.  But I'm going to sneak in a short ride between grading exams and papers. 

Turn, Turn, Turn (And We're Not Talking About The Byrds)!

Until recently, I believed most bike lanes were designed by people who don't ride bicycles.  You may think I'm cynical, but I've ridden on too many lanes that ended abruptly ("bike lanes to nowhere"), had poor sight lines, let cyclists out into the middle of major intersections or were, for various other reasons, simply not any safer than the streets they paralleled.

Now I'm starting to wonder whether lane designers are acting under orders to reduce the population of cyclists.  I guess, for them, that's the easiest way to appease motorists upset that we're "taking the road away from" them.  

I mean, what other reason is there for this?



Had the bike lane continued in a straight line, or simply ended at that intersection, it would be safer for anyone who has to turn left from that intersection.  Instead, a cyclist riding through that loop has to make two sharp left turns almost within meters of each other in order to go where one left turn would have taken him or her.

And studies have shown that left turns are significantly more dangerous than right turns for motorists.  (That is the reason why, for example, all United Parcel Service delivery routes are planned so that the drivers make only right turns.)  What sort of diabolical mind would force cyclists to make two such turns in succession?

This strange piece of transportation "planning" was inflicted on the cyclists of Nottingham.  I thought planners in England knew better.  Oh, well.

Would The UCI Allow This In A Cyclo-Cross Race?

Early yesterday morning, we had one of those "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" snowstorms.  It dropped maybe a couple of inches on us before the temperature rose dramatically and turned the falling flakes to rain.

Still, it was a reminder that winter is indeed no longer in the future.  Last night, the temperature dropped even more precipitously (had to use that word!) than it rose the other day.  So, some of the snow that turned to puddles in the rain were frozen when I rode to work this morning.  Fortunately, none of them were in my path.

The snow, cold and ice got me to thinking about commuting this winter.  Last winter, we had one blizzard that dumped nearly two feet of snow on us, but otherwise a pretty mild season. Somehow I think that this season will be different.

So I want to be ready. 

Unfortunately, this "snow bike conversion kit" is no longer available.  Even if I'd never bought one (which I probably wouldn't), it's still nice to know that such a thing available.

It, however, begs the question of what exactly was converted, and to what.  It doesn't look like it began with a whole bicycle.  The wheel looks like it came from one, or could have been part of one.  And how is that thing powered?

The seller promised a "full or partial refund if the item is not as described".  That's reassuring, I guess. 

The Biko Bike Project

If you are a student in the University of Manchester (UK), you can rent a bike for one pound a week, with a 40 GBP deposit that's returned to you when you return the bike.

You have your choice of road bikes, mountain bikes or city bikes.   What they all have in common is their colour (it's in the UK, remember!) scheme:  The frame is yellow and the front fork is an Easter-egg purple.

These bikes are rented by the Biko Bikes Project, organized by members of UM's Student Action, the self-described "volunteering arm" of the UM Student Union.  They are involved in community-based volunteer projects that help, among others, the homeless and refugees, and in cleaning up the environment. (Manchester was one of the first cities changed by the Industrial Revolution.)  The Biko Bikes Project aims to promote "the best mode of transportation":  cycling.

The bikes are "rescued" by agreement with the university, having been abandoned in various places in and around the campus.  Then the bikes are stripped, painted an rebuilt by students who take the repair workshops the Project conducts.

In addition to bike repair, the Project also offers workshops in "bicycle confidence", in recognition that for many people, one of the greatest deterrents to cycling is the fear of traffic and other conditions they might encounter on a bicycle.  

The Project is named in honor of Steve Bantu Biko, who is considered one of the "martyrs" of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. 

Like Frantz Fanon, he studied medicine but developed an intense interest in black consciousness, which led him to the organizing activity that would get him banned from the university in which he was studying.  The protests he organized culminated in the Soweto Uprising of June 1976.



A little more than a year later, on 18 August 1977, he was arrested at a police roadblock in Port Elizabeth under the Terrorism Act No. 83 of 1967, enacted specifically as an attempt to thwart activists like Biko.  The arresting officers took him to a police station, where he was subjected to a 22-hour interrogation that included torture and beatings that sent him into a coma.  He suffered a major injury and was chained to a window grille for a day.

On 11 September, police officers loaded him--naked and manacled, and barely alive-- into the back of a Land Rover for an 1100 km (685 mile) drive to Pretoria, where there was a prison with hospital facilities.  He arrived the following day.  Not long after, he died.  The original report said he'd died of a long hunger strike, but an autopsy revealed, in addition to numerous abrasions and bruises, a brain hemorrhage from his massive head injuries.

Were he alive, Steve Biko would turn 70 years old today.  The students at the University of Manchester could hardly pick a better person to commemorate than a man who "they had to kill" at age 30 to "prolong Apartheid".

Who made that trenchant observation?  Somebody named Nelson Mandela.

Update (23 December 2016):  Timothy Loh of Biko Bikes says that, for budgetary reasons, the bikes are no longer painted.  They still, however, are affixed with the Biko decal.

What Else Have We Here?

I haven't yet begun to work on my estate-sale find.  That probably won't begin until next week.  

Funny, though, how I'm thinking about the details, even though I haven't even started to build the wheels or assemble anything else on the bike.

At first, I thought I would wrap the bars--Velo Orange Porteurs with bar-end brake levers (the same setup I have on Vera and Helene, my Mercian mixtes)--in leather or the Deda faux leather tape, which comes in a shade that more or less mirrors a Brooks honey-colored B17 saddle darkened by  few of thousand miles and a couple of applications of Proofhide. (Yes, that's the saddle I plan to use--unless someone wants to trade me a black or blue one for it.)  I prefer the feel of actual leather, but the Deda is pretty nice and is more durable.  My only complaint about it is that it's full of Deda logos.

But, as I was trolling eBay, I chanced upon this:

Pardon the condition of my nails.  It's finals week!

Tressostar cloth tape.  Eight rolls:  four in blue, four in gray.  (No, this isn't a Civil War re-enactment!)  Best of all, the right shade of blue and the right shade of gray for the Trek:

Like much NOS (new old stock) bicycle equipment found on eBay, they came from a bike shop that closed.  

The seller was offering the tape at $10 for two rolls:  a pretty good price these days.  (Around the time  the world was discovering Bruce Springsteen, I paid $1 for two rolls of the same tape in red!)  He had four rolls of each color remaining and I offered to buy all of them.  He asked for $20.  Yes, for eight rolls.

I am thinking about wrapping the bars "barber pole" or "candy cane" style, using both colors.  I would wrap the entire bar, as I did on my Mercian mixtes, because I occasionally use the forward position.  Also, when bar-end levers are used, the cable sits against the bar, as it does with "aero" road levers.  That means they have to be taped or clamped against the bars.  If nothing else, covering them with whatever bar wrap I use will be more attractive than the electrical tape I use to fasten the cable housing to the bar.

Hmm...Now that I'm going to use cloth tape, maybe I should try something I've never done before...Shellac?

Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

Over the years, I have come to realize that there we have rationales, and we have our  motivatons, for cycling.

The rationales are the reasons why we say we ride:  You can get to work faster than you can on the bus.  It's less expensive than even mass transportation, let alone driving, even if you are one of those people who will commute or go to the store only on top-of-the-line equipment.  When you pedal, there is one less motorized vehicle on the road--which, of course, is good for the environment.  And, it's good for your heart, lungs and everything else in your body (well, almost).  Hey, I know of people who gave up their gym memberships after they started cycling to work.

Now, of course, those are all perfectly good reasons to ride.  But I don't think anyone--even one who fancies him or her self an environmentalist or a "health nut"--has ever become a "lifer" on the bike only because of such rationales.

Professor on a bicycle

In much the same way that the things that the things you live on are not the same as the things you live for, the things that keep us cycling for decades have more to do with our motivations.  Some of them can be the spawn of rationales:  You might keep on riding because it's helping you to breathe or sleep better, or it's saving you money.  But I think that if we keep on riding from childhood into old age (even when other forms of transportation and exercise are available to us), the things that motivate us are not nearly so pragmatic.

The greatest motivator for me is, of course, that I love cycling.  I have not found any other activity that allows me to spread my wings and keep my feet on the ground at the same time:  I feel the exhiliaration of gliding through the city and country and a connection, if not entanglement, with the ground or the street under me.  And it frees my mind:  I sometimes find myself working through a problem or simply generating an idea that I couldn't when I was in my apartment or at my desk.

I suspect that most lifetime cyclists (or, at least, people who ride for as long as they are able) are spurred by the sort of motivation I've described.  A former partner once observed that for me, cycling is as much a spiritual or metaphysical experience as it is anything else.  The long ride I took every Saturday was, she said, "your equivalent of church".

Now, I'm not a very religious person, but I understood what she meant.  For me, cycling has always been expansive:  My mind is as free to move as my body is when I'm astride two wheels.

I must say, though, that not all of my thoughts are profound. (You know as much about me if you've been following this blog!)  Sometimes my mind plays, or I simply get giddy or silly.  But even in my most mirthful moments, I have never come up with the sort of riddle this creature is pondering:

Yes, I give him or her "props" for that.  But then again, he or she has had 40 million more years than I've had to come up with such a witticism!

My Morning Commute: Only In 1984. Only From Cannondale.

On my way to work today, I saw only one other cyclist.  I wasn't surprised because this morning was the coldest we've had since February.  And it was windy, which I really noticed when crossing the RFK Bridge.  

That cyclist, though, was riding a bike older than he is.  That, in itself, is not so unusual, as I often see people--particularly the young--on machines passed on to them by parents or older siblings, or found in basements, garages, barns or yard sales.

Some of those bikes could fetch money on eBay as "vintage" items.  In a way, that's very funny to me, because I remember when they were the sorts of things you'd see every day.  Most were good for the sorts of rides and riders they were designed for, but we never thought they were exceptional in any way.

But the rider I saw today was pedaling a rig that was unusual when it was made--and simply strange today:

Cannondale made its first mountain bike in 1984.  It's the one in the photo above--and the one ridden by the fellow I saw today.  Unfortunately, I didn't get to take a photo of the bike.  But, from my brief glimpse of it, I don't think it had been ridden very much.  

When that bike was made, mountain bikes were still new to most people who didn't live in northern California or, perhaps, upper New England.  It seems that those who were involved in the then-evolving sport of mountain biking hadn't developed any notions about what mountain bikes were "supposed" to be.  

At least, their notions seemed fluid compared to those of us who were road bikers, even those as young as I was:  While the designs of certain components had evolved and refined, a good road racing, touring or sport-touring bike had more or less the same design and elements (lugged steel frames with a certain range of geometries) they'd had for about two or three generations before us.  

On the other hand, the first mass-marketed mountain bike--the Specialized Stumpjumper-- began production only three years earlier.  Its design was a kind of cross-breed of the custom mountain bikes Tom Ritchey, Gary Fisher and a few other pioneers had been making for about half a decade.  Although the first shipment of 125 Stumpjumpers (built in Japan) sold out in six days and subsequent runs sold even more quickly, the Stumpjumper would not set the standard for mountain-bike design--at least, not for very long. 

The truth was that even folks like Ritchey, Fisher and Chris Chance were still figuring out how to design their bikes, which had begun with Schwinn cruisers retrofitted with multiple gears and caliper brakes.  By the time the Stumpjumper came along, they and folks like Charlie Kelly were building lugged or fillet-brazed frames of chrome-moly tubing with long wheelbases--which, really, were lighter (yet stronger) versions of the old cruisers.  

According to the information I've come across, all of the early mountain bike frames--including that of the Stumpjumper--were built from steel.  That is no surprise when you consider that about 99 percent of bikes were still being fabricated from that material. The only difference was that the lighter, more expensive bikes used alloy steels--maganese molybdenum (Reynolds 531) or chrome molybdenum (Columbus and Tange), while cheaper, heavier bikes used carbon steel.  

Although bikes were made from it as early as the 1890s, aluminum was little-used as a frame material until the mid-1970s, when the "screwed and glued" Alan frames were built.  A few years later, Gary Klein designed an aluminum frame with wide-diameter tubing to make it stiffer.  In 1982--the year after the Stumpjumper first saw the light of day--Cannondale made the first mass-produced aluminum bicycles.

Those first Cannondales were road bicycles--racing, touring and sport models.  If you rode one of those early Cannondales, as I did, you know that their design has changed quite a bit.  So, I think it's fair to say that if Cannondale was still figuring out how to make aluminum road bikes, they were really starting from "square one" with that first mountain bike.  But it's also fair to say that no one else knew how to design aluminum mountain bikes, for--at least, from the information I've gathered--no one else, not even Klein, was building them at that time.

For all I know, the fellow I saw today on an early Cannondale mountain bike may have no idea about the history I've just described.  He probably just knows that he's riding a funny-looking bike.  Maybe he doesn't care.

Still, I can't help but to wonder who came up with the idea of designing a bike around a 24 inch rear wheel with a 26 inch front. As fluid as ideas about mountain bikes were at that time,  Cannondale was probably the only bike maker that could get away with doing such a thing.  And 1984 was probably the only year they could have done it.

Letting The Cat Out Of My Randonneur Bag

I just did something dangerous.

It was even more risky than riding my old Bontrager Race Lite with a Rock Shox Judy down the steps of Montmartre.  Or rappelling from a rock face over white waters to a rocky shore.  

Those stunts could have left me maimed.  But of course I didn't believe that was going to happen to me; otherwise, I never would have done them. Truth be told, I knew that neither of them would last any longer than "the pause that refreshes", if you know what I mean. 

But what I did could have taken away hours that I will never get back.  You see, in the middle of reading those stacks of papers that seem to multiply no matter how much time I spend reading, I needed a diversion.  I was going to go for a bike ride, but I might not have come back--or at least gotten back to the task at hand.  

So, instead of a bike trip, I took a side trip on Google.  

Hmm..So that's what Max does when I'm not home.

And he's famous.  How did I not know?

And he dismounts even more gracefully than I do!

Please, don't tell me that Max and Marlee crashed the tandem:

I don't have a tandem.  But I don't want them to crash anything?

When I fix stuff, Marlee feels the need to inspect:

She says she can't help because--get this--"I don't have opposable thumbs!"

Do all cats use that excuse?

Sometimes I think that if dogs try to please humans, cats try to be as much like humans as possible without actually being human.  I am especially conscious of that when I'm leaving for work on a cold, wet, raw day and see Max and Marlee curled up on the couch.

Now tell me:  Which is the more intelligent species?