I promise: Vera will not end up looking like this:
However, she may end up with a fixed gear or a "flip-flop" hub. Now that she's become my regular commuter, I'm really thinking about dispensing with the derailleur.
Some of you will tell me to consider an internally-geared hub (IGH). I am. However, I haven't had the best of luck with the ones I've had. Hal, the Bicycle Habitat mechanic who's built any wheel I ride and haven't built myself (and who set up Arielle, Tosca and Helene) says the only IGH he likes is the Rohloff, which costs more than my first ten or so bikes.
And, I'll admit that I like the elegant simplicity of fixed gears, and even single speed freewheels. But don't worry: If I go that route, or give in to an IGH, I won't do anything silly like cutting off the derailleur mounting "ear" on the rear dropout. In fact, I don't want to cut, drill bend or otherwise mutilate the frame for any modification.
Just before I got home, I stopped at Tony's Bicycle Shop in Astoria. Even before I moved into the neighborhood, I used to go there whenever I happened to be riding that way because I liked the old proprietor and they had all sorts of then-unfashionable parts that would soon come to be known as "old school."
Anyway, I didn't have my camera with me, so you will be spared from one of the more hideous sights I've seen in Tony's shop. A Pinarello racing bike was clamped into one of the repair stands. It had one of those awful 1980's fade paint job. Strangely, it was tricolore, but in (from the rear) blue, white and red.
To tell you the truth, I've seen worse fade jobs, and, ironically, the addition of another color--yellow--in the saddle and the bands of the tire treads made it almost tolerable. However, one of the mechanics was in the process of turning the bike into a real aesthetic monstrosity: He was wrapping the handlebars with Cinelli "Italian flag" cork tape. I know, the bike is Italian, and some guys just want to flaunt the Italian-ness of their bikes. But, please, have some respect for a country that produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Botticelli and Titian!
However, I noticed something even more disturbing while at Tony's. It had nothing to do with anything any of the shop employees did. Rather, it echoed and confirmed an impression I've had lately: Bicycle theft is on the rise.
Another customer came in looking for something she could use to keep her wheels and seat from being stolen. Several of her friends had already lost those items on their bikes, one of them in the hallway of the building in which she lives. She also mentioned that a friend of hers caught a thief in the act; when the friend confronted the thief, he cursed the guy out and went about his business.
I found the above image on "A Short Introduction to Cycling," a British cycling blog. As the author points out, it's unusual to get such a good shot of the perps in action. Most of the time, as he points out, we have only grainy images from security cameras. And, the thieves in those images are usually of hooded young men, and the graininess of the images renders them even more non-descript.
Lots of people would say something like, "Those guys don't look like bike thieves." What I find even more remarkable, though,is that they did it in an open public area of London, not on some shady venue. Seeing that photo reminded me that bike theft, and crime generally, is becoming more brazen as well as more frequent than they have been in a long time.
The image also brought to mind something from around 1990--around the time bike theft and all sorts of other crime were at their peak here in New York. I had gone to the Paris Theatre, which is right across West 58th Street from the Plaza Hotel, to see a film--I forget which, exactly.
I think I was upset about something or another that day. That was when I was living in my previous identity: I was, of course, Nick. I was two decades younger and riding my bike much more than I do now, and I was lifting weights every day. Plus, even if I weren't upset about something specific that day, I carried the sort of anger--Some people who knew me said they could see it in my shoulders--that caused complete strangers to cross the street when they saw me approaching.
Anyway, I left the theatre and turned left on 58th Street. In front of one of the buildings was a bicycle rack. A guy who was built about the same way I was lifted a Motobecane and began twisting it, expecting to break the lock. I approached him from behind and tapped my finger on his shoulder. He turned, took one look at me and bolted.
He wasn't trying to steal my bike. But the fact that he was trying to take anybody's bike--possibly someone's transportation or simply someone's pride and joy--did nothing to quell whatever rage I was feeling.
I would love to have a photo of that, though I hope not to see anything like it again. And I still hope that we won't have anything like the tide of theft we had in those days. However, things haven't been looking good: The squeegee men are back.
In today's post on Lovely Bicycle!, "Velouria" presents the Trek Cocoa, which seems to be Trek's "take" on what is commonly called the Dutch-style bicycle.
Way back in 2000, Tammy and I took a trip to France. We talked about buying two bikes like those and bringing them back. Buying the bikes wouldn't have been so expensive, at least relatively speaking as, in those pre-Euro days, the dollar enjoyed a favorable exchange rate almost everywhere on the Continent. However, we figured out that we would have had to buy another plane ticket to get them back.
They might have worked for us as commuters or "town" bikes, and they certainly would have been conversation pieces, as almost no American who hadn't spent some time in Europe knew what a "Dutch-style bike" is.
But I digress. I agree with Velouria that the Cocoa is a lovely bike. So was the Belleville, Trek's take on the traditional mixte bike. I was tempted to buy one of the latter, which seems to have been discontinued, before I decided to save my money for Helene. However, two mechanics at a shop that sells Treks talked me out of buying a Belleville. Of course, one shouldn't infer that the Cocoa isn't a good bike: Perhaps Trek learned from something from making the Belleville.
I will admit that both are very nice bikes to look at. It seems, though, that Trek applies Newton's First Law of Motion to the aesthetics of its bikes: For every pretty bike they make, they make a really ugly one. (One might also say that it's a Hegelian dialectic.) To wit:
In case you're a glutton for visual punishment, here's a detail:
It used to be that bike makers' racing bikes were their prettiest. That was especially true of the Italian bike makers but was also the case for nearly all makers, big or small, in the days when nearly all quality frames were lugged steel.
Then again, at the same time Trek introduced the Belleville, they also came out with this monstrosity:
The graphics and color scheme reminded me of a Huffy, circa 1978. Why anyone would emulate a Huffy in any way is beyond me.
