An Ovation That Hasn't Found Its Audience

We've all seen, or at least heard of, "solutions in search of problems." They seem, as often as not, to come from engineers, inventors or simply geeks who have too much time on their hands.

The bicycle world has seen its share of such "solutions".  What's sad or funny, depending on your point of view, is that even if no problem is found for the solution and said solution fades away quietly, someone might revive it.  An example is elliptical or ovoid chainrings, which I discussed in an earlier post.

I remember hearing about another innovation that left me wondering, "And the purpose of this is...?"  I hadn't thought about it in a long time until someone passed along a video of it:




I guess somebody figured that if four-wheel drive works for jeeps, two-wheel drive would work on bikes, especially mountain bikes. 

The bike in the video made its debut in a 2005 robotics show.  I have to wonder whether its inventors knew that, nearly a decade and a half earlier, someone else had the same idea. And it shared the same problem with its descendent:  It didn't work very well. 

The Legacy Ovation first saw the light of day in 1991.  I remember reading about it in one of the magazines at the time.  If it looks like a conventional mountain bike with an oversized speedometer cable running through it, well, that's pretty much what it is.  Besides the cable, the other major difference is in the front wheel, which is a rear wheel, and the fork, which has a diameter of 135 mm (most front forks are 100 mm) to accommodate the wheel. 

 

As you can probably tell, the rear wheel (the one that's actually in the rear) is powered in the same way as rear wheels on other bikes.  Each end of the cable has a rotor-cut gear mounted on the side opposite the freewheel.  So, the rotation of the rear wheel causes the front wheel to turn.

The idea actually sounds pretty good.  One of the problems, though, is that of "fighting" the gear, which has a lot of resistance.  Also, having such gears exposed leads to rapid wear and deterioration, which was the downfall of the few Ovations that were ridden.

Solutions like the Ovation don't always find a problem, thankfully.  But sometimes they find a market.  And the bicycle's developers confidently predicted that their invention would capture "20 to 40 percent of the market over the next few years".  It, of course, didn't, and neither did the bike shown at the robotics show.  From what I understand, there have been a couple of other attempts, since then, to create a two-wheel drive.  They didn't gain traction (pun intended) with the public, either. 

Still, even if the two-wheel drive bicycle doesn't find the problem it's supposed to solve, the idea probably won't die.  As long as there's the potential for finding an audience, would-be inventors and entrepreneurs will probably continue to work on this "solution", whether or not it ever finds its problem.

Easy Like Your Sunday Best

Some things never end.

Like the mails and e-mails I get from the alumni associations and foundations of the schools I attended.  I've moved to different states and countries, changed my name and even had mail delivery stopped during a time when I was feeling depressed and hermetic.  About the only thing those schools didn't seem to know is my financial situation:  They hit me up for money, whether or not I have it!

Then there are those mails and e-mails you get from retailers.  You might have bought an inner tube or a beanie ten years ago, but they send you announcements of the sales they always seem to be running.  Some of them spend more trying to sell more to you than you spent in their establishments in the first place!

One such e-mail I received today is trying to get me to buy "discounted" bike jerseys that were way overpriced to begin with.  I had to chuckle at one of those offers, though:  for a Castelli jersey called "Sunday Best".

Growing up in blue-collar Italian-American Brooklyn and New Jersey, I never heard the term.  It still sounds vaguely WASP-y to me.  So, perhaps, it's no surprise that the jersey looks like this:

If that jersey has anything to do with Sunday, the design makes me think of the Episcopal Church--which, according to Robin Williams (who grew up in it), offers all of the ceremony of the Roman Catholic Church (in which I grew up) with half of the guilt.

When I attended Catholic school, we wore our school uniforms to church.  After my family moved to New Jersey, dress codes relaxed and most of us didn't have a "best" outfit for church:  We just cleaned ourselves up and made ourselves more or less presentable.  For most of my adult life, I haven't attended church and when I go to any sort of social function, it's usually with people who don't care about what I look like.  If I wear a skirt or a tailored pair of pants, most people I know would say I'm "dressed up", though my attire might not be most people's idea of "Sunday Best."

Ironically, through all of those years I was racing or just riding with racers (or "wannabes"), my "Sunday Best" included bike kit.  Most of us took long or "fun" rides on the Lord's Day.  Or we might join organized rides, such as the one a bunch of us used to take from Brooklyn to New Hope, PA and back.  On such rides, I used to wear my "best" (or, at least, favorite) jersey or outfit.  

These days, I don't wear cycle-specific clothing, except for gloves.  So my "Sunday Best" is whatever I happen to be wearing when I'm riding on the second day of the weekend.

Now, if I'd lived another life, my "Sunday Best" might look like this:

Nine Years, Nine Lives--With Max

It's hard to believe that I was once nine years old.

It's also hard to believe that, not so long ago, really, nine years seemed like a geologic age.

Now it goes by in the blink of an eye.  Periods of five and ten years start to blend with each other.  I realized as much when I made an offhand remark that something looked "Soo '80's."  

The person to whom I made the remark corrected me:  "More like early '90's".  After thinking for a moment, he said, "The '80's, the '90's--at our age, the decades run together."

That I can think of nine years as, in essence, a decade, says something about my perception of time.  I think I've also reached a point where any amount of time more than fifteen years becomes twenty.

Anyway...today, the 9th marks nine years of a relationship--with someone who, proverbially, has nine lives.

I am talking about none other than Max.  

Whenever I come home from a bike ride, he circles my wheels and my feet.  I feed him and, as soon as he's sated, he climbs onto my lap, whether I'm drinking, eating, reading or just spacing out.  

It still amazes me that such a wonderful cat came my way--and I didn't pay, or really do, anything to get him. In an earlier post, I told the story of how he came into my life. Whatever I've spent on him--which, really, isn't much--has been a pittance.  After all, when he climbs and walks on me, I feel as relaxed as I do after a good massage.  And when I'm tired or feeling blue, I talk to him and feel as if I've had a nice therapy sessions.

In  brief, he's a stress-reliever.  Of course, I don't tell him that:  I don't want to reduce him to mere usefulness.  I simply love having him around, and I hope he's around for some more years.  He's fifteen now, according to the vet who examined him just before I took him in.  In the scheme of things, that might just be the blink of an eye.  But it is a relationship, it is a love--which is to say, it is a life.