Sound: Of The Wind, Or From It?

April Fool's Day was nearly two weeks ago.  Still, I thought the e-mail someone sent me about a certain bicycle accessory was a joke.  Then again, I think a lot of bicycle accessories are jokes, whether or not they are intended as such.

Anyway...It has to do with the sounds you hear when you're riding.  Me, when I'm riding, I like to be aware of my surroundings.  That is why I never ride with headphones:  I want to hear traffic and such, so I can be alert to any possible hazards.  When none exist, I like to enjoy the sounds of birds chirping, ocean waves spilling,  the wind rippling and rasping,  and snippets of conversation--or simply silence, depending on where I am.

When I was a kid, Radio Shack used to offer transistor (Is that what I am to my siblings?) radios that clamped onto the handlebars.  I was tempted to buy one, mainly because they were offered in every color in which jellybeans were ever made.  Or so it seemed.  But since that fancy passed, I never had any desire to add an accessory that made sounds I couldn't already hear from my saddle.

I guess others don't feel the same way.  For them, Korean designer Joseph Kim created Sound From The Wind, which, as its name tells us, takes the breeze that blows in your face and turns it into something that sounds like a flute or an ocarina.  The funny thing, though, is that the device looks like something a kid of my generation might've put on a Sting Ray or Chopper to pretend he was piloting a fighter jet.  Like such devices, Sound From The Wind grows louder as you ride faster.  The pitch can be altered with switches on the handlebars.

Hmm...I wonder whether the way one rides also determines what kind of music comes from the device.  I mean, how would I have to pedal if I wanted to hear Vivaldi's La Tempesta di Mare?  Or a Chopin nocturne?

P.S.  Gotta wonder about that brake lever...
 

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: