22 July 2014

If You Crossed Daniel Rebour With James Thurber...

Now I am going to pose a completely pointless question, as I am wont to do.

Here goes:  What would Daniel Rebour have drawn for the New Yorker?

I think I've found the answer:








The man responsible for this drawing, Jean-Jacques Sempe, in fact did a cover for the publication E.B. White made famous:

 1983 The New Yorker cover 

He was born in Bordeaux in 1932 and is, from what I understand, still active.  He is very well-known in France as well as other countries, mainly for the often-whimsical and often romantic, if sentimental (sounds really French, doesn't it?) work for Paris Match. Here in the US, more people have seen his work than know of the man who did it.















Can you imagine Sempe in a room with James Thurber--or Daniel Rebour?


21 July 2014

The Lunartic

For a moment, I thought someone tried to ride a handcuff.





Turns out, the contraption is even cleverer (Now there's a word only a Brit can get away with using!) than that. 


That strange-looking rear wheel is belt-driven and hubless.  (Could even a Brit get away with saying "hubless"?)  The moving parts are housed, which makes the bike's wheelbase. 


Luke Douglas, the wheel's creator, said he was trying to make a bike as compact as possible without having to fold it.  He said he was also trying to eliminate the awkward ride qualities of many folding or collapsible bikes.


At the time he designed it, he was a student at the Loughborough (UK) Design School.  He entered it in the 2011 competition for the James Dyson Award.  Alas, he didn't win.


He should have gotten some kind of award, though, for the name he gave his invention:  the Lunartic.


20 July 2014

Sunday Sailing


I admit this photo hasn't much to do with cycling, save for the fact that I took it on Point Lookout, one of the places to which I pedaled last week.

But somehow it seems right for a Sunday afternoon in summer.  And I suppose it has something like composition and a balance of tones in it.  Even if it doesn't, I hope you like it.



19 July 2014

The Bike That Meant Everything

Having your bike stolen is never a happy experience.  Even if it's an old rust-holder or is ridden only occasionally, losing your bike means losing a part of yourself, however small.

The reason, I believe,is that any bike we own holds some part of our experience.  Of course, if it's a bike you ride every day, whether to work or for pleasure, it's a companion.  If you took a once-in-a-lifetime tour, or raced, on it, it was an extension of you.  And, even if your relationship with your steed isn't so intimate, you have a memory of acquiring it.

If the bike was previously ridden by someone dear to you, of course that makes it all the more precious.  Just ask Mikaela Rogers.




















Three decades earlier, a teenaged Mike Rogers got tired of riding pieced-together hand-me-downs and saved the wages of his minimum-wage job for a black Bianchi Sport SS.  He rode it to school, on a tour and the bike paths that were later built in Minneapolis, near his home turf.  But one day he noticed that riding left him even more fatigued and in pain than usual.  He thought he was just out of shape and that he could pedal his way back to health.  If only...

He died three years ago from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as Lou Gherig's disease.

After he could no longer mount the Bianchi, Mikaela--who was, by that time, almost the same age Mike was when he bought it--rode to and from school and around town much as he did three decades earlier, even though the frame was much too big for her.  She simply wouldn't dream of riding anything else.


So, of course, one of her most heartbreaking experiences--short of losing her father--was going to the family's shed and not seeing the bike hanging from its usual perch.

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending.  Someone found the bike abandoned on a street corner, placed an ad in Craigslist and reunited the Bianchi--and the memories of the man who bought it so many years earlier--with a young woman.

18 July 2014

Mystery Bike

Yesterday I saw this bike parked on Greenpoint Avenue:



Of course, I loved the color and was fascinated with the way the twin-lateral tubes curved from the seat tube to the rear dropout. It's not the first time I've seen such a configuration.  Still, something told me there was something strange about the bike.



The Huret Allvit derailleur on the rear was more than likely original equipment.  To paraphrase Frank Berto, it shifts poorly forever.  The crankset also looked as if it had never been removed from the bike, although I suspect that, at some point, a chainguard was.



The shift lever was a plastic model from Simplex.  Perhaps the derailleur was a replacement after all. Or maybe the shifter was.  It was interesting, though, to see it on a brazed-on boss.  But what I saw in front of it:



Or at the bottom bracket:





Perhaps my initial belief that this bike was French was wrong after all.  Almost any Gallic ladies' or mixte bike of the era from which this bike appeared to be (the early 1970's or earlier) that wasn't made by a constructeur had lugs.  Perhaps I was looking at a cleverly-disguised masterpiece.

Not surprisingly, the wheels and pedals were replacements. So, too, was the rear brake, I suspect:



Nearly all modern caliper brakes are mounted in a hole through the front fork crown or a bridge connecting the rear stays. At one time, calipers that clamped like the one in the photo were common.  Later, they were used on bikes that originally were equipped with cantilever or rod brakes, which usually weren't drilled.  But no one, it seems, made such brakes after the mid-1960's or thereabouts.

Stickers from Transportation Alternatives and other cycling-related organizations indicate that this bike is, or had been, ridden regularly.  I wonder whether its rider has or had any idea of what he or she is or was riding.