To The Moon

What do you see when you look at the moon?

We have all heard of, if not seen, the "Man in the Moon".  Some cultures have mythologized "him".

Even if you are the most hard-core rational empiricist, it's not hard to understand why people would see "him":  The lights and shadows, at times, do bear a resemblance to a face.

Modern psychology has confirmed something artists, poets and philosophers have long understood:  We are tend to find the familiar in the unfamiliar, to find meaning and shape in the seemingly-random and formless.  So it's really not so odd that someone might think, for example, that he or she has seen the face of Elvis in a potato chip.  This phenomenon is called pareidolia.

Thus, other cultures have myths that acribe a handprint (India), tree (Hawaii) and, yes, a woman (New Zealand).  And people in some East Asian cultures see a rabbit in the moon.

Somehow I always liked the idea of a rabbit in the moon.  Apparently, illustrator Claudia McGehee does, too.

I love this.  I'll love it no less if I find out she created it after watching E.T.

Crankin' Up The Insanity

Back in the good ol' days--the '90's--it seemed as if every twenty-something dude in California whose father had a lathe in his garage was making bike parts. Most of them were intended for mountain bikes, but a few were made for road and fixed-gear bikes, which were just in the process of being discovered by the hipster-equivalents of that time.

A few, like Chris King and the makers of Paul components, still make superb, if pricey, stuff.  However, a number of would-be challengers to Shimano (and, later, SRAM) fell by the wayside--some deservedly so.  It seems that some of the more notable and spectacular casualties are those who tried to make the lightest cranksets they could.

One such misguided attempt was the original Kooka crank.  Back in my off-road riding days, I knew a number of riders who rode--and broke--them.  But, hey, they were the hippest and lightest things available.  And they were available in all sorts of color combinations, including some that were conceived by folks who smoked things not made by RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris:

and some of them weren't even Rastafarians:

(My dear Bob Marley, I mean no disrespect to you or any other Rasta!)

These cranks had an alarming habit of breaking on where the spider attached to it, or around the square axle mounts or the holes into which pedals are installed.  The latter makes sense, as those are the weaker areas of the cranks.  But the for a spider to separate from an arm means that--well, it wasn't attached very firmly in the first place.  In the case of those early Kooka cranks, only a set screw held them together.

I mean, it had been known for much of the history of cycling that a crankset is stiffer and stronger when the spider arms are integral with the drive-side crank arms.  On the best cranks, they are cold-forged; on less-expensive but still-serviceable cranks, they are melt-forged.  On still less expensive cranks the spider is swaged (pressed) to the arm.  Still, I know of many people who rode the latter kind of crank, as I did, for many miles without any problems.

But, oddly enough (Well, was anything really odd when it came to these cranks?), axle-mount failures usually came on the non-drive side, where there is supposed to be less stress.  The reason, it seems, is that the spider was actually designed to reinforce the drive-side arm, which was otherwise identical to the non-drive-side arm.

Even though I would have loved to get the "ultra violet" finish, I had my doubts about their strength even before some of my old riding buddies trashed theirs.  I'm glad I listened to those misgivings.

Kooka later redesigned their cranks in a more traditional way, but the damage to their reputation was done.

Another example of how, in spite of what Robert Browning wrote in Andrea del Sarto, less is not always more, can be found in the Topline cranks of that era.  To be fair, the few people I knew who rode them on the road had no problems with them.  But some off-roaders had failures similar to those on the Kooka cranks--though, again to be fair, they weren't just riding the local trails.  

Like Kookas, Toplines were redesigned after a few years and became part of the Cook (no, not Koch) Brothers' line of components. That is probably what kept them in the marketplace, as CB had by that time established a reputation for sound, reliable design.

 Oh, but I love that purple.  I really do.  But not enough to pay $350 on eBay.  Believe it or not, people are actually paying even more for the original Kookas!

 

 

This Young Man Delivers

Three decades have passed since I was a bike messenger in Manhattan.   As far as I know, none of the other messengers I knew from those days is still "in the business" in any capacity, not even as a dispatcher or owner of a courier company.

Still, I feel a certain kinship with anyone who makes deliveries on a bicycle (though not on e-bikes or motor scooters!).  I was a messenger, in part, because at that time in my life, I couldn't have worked in an office or any other place with four walls, and I couldn't deal with any other human being--with one or two exceptions--for more than a few minutes at a time.  

Also, even though I was quickly forgotten when I stopped making deliveries--after all, it wasn't hard to replace me--I still sometimes feel as if no work I've done since those days was as vital.  Or, at least, the absence of anything I've done since then wouldn't be noticed as much as my failure to deliver the blueprints, letters, packages and lunches(!) I brought to offices, businesses and, on occasion, people's homes.

Even so, I never did anything as important as Sizwe Nzima has been doing for the past four years.

He was waiting--and waiting--on line for his grandparents' HIV medication.  They couldn't get to the Cape Town, South Africa clinic where the medicine was dispensed, so Sizwe--who was still a high school student--made frequent trips there.  He realized that others who were waiting with him on line had similar stories, or were themselves people who arrived only after great difficulty.  They usually came, as Nzima did, from the city's low-income townships, far from the center. 

Poverty and unemployment are rampant in those areas.  Most of the residents are black.  Nzima found out that while many companies delivered medications to people's homes, none went to the impoverished communities like the one in which his grandparents lived.  The companies told him they weren't acting out of prejudice:  They simply couldn't find the homes--wooden and metal shacks--because they don't show up on Google or other search engines.

Sizwe Nizma (r) and one of his employees deliver medicines in a Cape Town neighborhood.

Only someone with local knowledge could navigate the area.  Nzima has that.  While sitting on a hard wooden bench at the clinic, he realized he could use that knowledge to deliver HIV medicine to those houses the companies' maps and electronic devices couldn't find.

After a while, he branched out and started bringing people medications for other chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and epilepsy.  From having two customers--his grandparents--four years ago, he and his staff of six riders (some of whom work full-time) now serve 930 clients.

Now his business may branch out again:  an international shipping company wants to start delivery to Cape Town's urban townships. They, like the companies he contacted four years ago, can't find the houses.  Therefore, they need someone with local knowledge, and have contacted him.  They want him and his crew to do the work.

Not bad for a 23-year-old, eh?