Netting New Tires

 Formosa Tafetta.

Does it sound like the fabric in a gown a Chinese ambassador's wife (or daughter or girlfriend) wore to a formal dance in Taipei in, say, 1920 or thereabouts?

Well, you might find it in your next set of bicycle tires.

It's already in Patagonia's "Net Plus" line of clothing and accessories.

So what, exactly, is this wonder fabric?

Well, Formosa Tafetta is actually the name of the company that makes it--or, more precisely, harvests it from the sea.

No, there isn't some species of octopus or coral that spins silky threads into nets.  But the company's trademark fabric--Seawastex--is made from fishing nets recovered around Taiwan's waters.  Some were battered and abandoned; others were apparently lost.

Turns out, even in the tattered nets, up to 95 percent of the material is recyclable.  And, since all of them are recovered, and all of the work of converting them is done, in and around Taiwan, Seawastex has a 49 percent smaller carbon footprint than virgin-manufactured nylon.

At 2023 Taipei Cycle, the company showcased its new collaboration with well-known tire-maker Maxxis.  Sewastex will be used to make the casings under the rubber that meets the road (or trail).  Nearly all bicycle tires today have nylon casings.  A few high-performance tubular (sew-up) tires are still made with silk casings, which were once the gold-standard for durability and smoothness. (An old training partner of mine once proclaimed, "Riding silk sew-ups is better than sex!")  Fewer still are made with cotton.

Now, if I were riding those Seawastex Maxxis tires in the peloton, I could really say I was "catching" other riders and "netting" a prize!  

From The Fourth to Le Quatorze

 Whenever I wasn't in the US for "The Fourth"--American Independence Day--I was in France, for "The Fourth" and "Le Quatorze":  the Fourteenth, a.k.a. Bastille Day.  

Today's the day in France, and for Francophiles all over the world.

I count myself as one. But even if you're not, try to remember that American independence is intertwined with the toppling of the ancien regime in France.  In both countries, revolutions were spawned by homegrown philosophers who questioned ideas of hereditary monarchy and nobility (even as, ahem, they owned slaves).

It's kind of ironic, really, that so many people in both countries celebrate their national holidays with picnics or barbecues in normally-tranquil parks and backyards--as fireworks explode, sometimes in the distance, sometimes not so far away.

And some of us, it's about the bike:

From Falling Off Bicycles

When The Lights Went Out

From A Leslie Wong Blog

During my lifetime, all of New York City was plunged into darkness three times.  I was in the Big Apple for two of them, and there was no looting or any other kind of violence. Today, I am going to write about the third.

On this date in 1977, right around sundown, lightning struck a line that relayed electrical power to New York City. At least, that is the official explanation for why, on a sweltering night and day that followed, lights went out, trains stopped and fans and air conditioners didn't work.  As cellphones were all but non-existent and very few people had computers, about the only way to know what had caused the disruption was through battery-operated radios.

The heat is a partial explanation of why so many parts of the city plunged into lawlessness and general chaos for 25 hours in 1977.  Indeed, the blackout of 1965 occurred on a mild, clear Fall night and while the 2003 blackout came on an August night it wasn't, or at didn't seem, as stiflingly hot as that July night in 1977.

But the summer of 1977 was part of a particularly difficult time for the city.  Less than two years earlier, the city came hours away from bankruptcy; on the night of the blackout, many people were still without work or other ways of supporting themselves or their families.  Also, crime was increasing rapidly in the years before the pandemic:  The Son of Sam, who had been terrorizing the area for about a year, seemed emblematic. Some would see the crime rate as a cause of the general sense that nothing--not the schools, not any of the other city services--was working; others would see it as an effect.  Whatever the case, a sense of desperation and anger filled much of the city, especially in its Brown and Black neighborhoods, where much of the violence occurred.

I haven't been able to find any accounts of whether people navigated the streets by bicycle in the absence of street lights.  I can feel pretty confident in saying, however, that bike shops were looted, along with other businesses:  Really, just about anything of value was taken.

(Some have said that the 1977 Blackout spurred the growth of hip-hop, in part because some would-be DJs, ahem, acquired their equipment that night!)

So why wasn't I in New York?  Well, I was with my parents in New Jersey that summer--the last I would spend with them--and baby-sat that night for one of my mother's friends.  We didn't lose our "juice," but I saw accounts of the stores broken into (sometimes by attaching a rope or chain between the store's front gate and a car) and fires set on TV.  At first, I thought it was a trailer for some movie or another:  Science fiction was big that year. (If I recall correctly, Star Wars came out around that time.)  Now, if I had been in New York, would the 1977 Blackout have been as peaceful as the ones in 1965 and 2003?