Road Signs For Cyclists

By now, we've all seen the international road signs. Yes, we even have some here in the US.  Hey, one day we might even have the metric system.

I saw those signs for the first time during my first bike tour in Europe.  I thought they were great:  Most of them didn't need explanation, which is nice when you don't know the local language.

They've got me to thinking about some signs for cyclists.  If you've travelled in a hilly area, you've probably seen the sign for falling rock zones.  So...how about one for a "falling rain zone"?

From MassBike

What A Day (Date)!

Today's post won't be about cycling.

That's because I was struck by how many historical events happened on this date, and I just had to talk about them.

You probably know about two of them.  If you think one of them was great, you think the other was terrible.

I am referring, of course, to the fall of the Berlin Wall (Was it really 25 years ago?) and Kristallnacht.

For all that I denounce the ways in which my native country abuses its power in the world, I still that the US and its allies can be made to offer a better life for their citizens in ways that totalitarian and collectivist states can't.  That is why I, like most people who have no connection to the Soviet system, think that puncturing that partition in the old German capital allowed a light to stream in.  Whether that light is used to make our lives brighter or turned into a kleig that breaks us down is still, I believe, a question that has not been decided, though it we are being nudged toward the answer most of us wouldn't want.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet premier at the time, is widely hailed as a hero in the West even if his policy of "glasnost" and "peristroika" inadvertently led to the collapse of the empire he headed.  Not surprisingly, leaders of the old Soviet heirarchy as well as anti-nationalists of the states formerly included in the Soviet Union despise him as much of the world reviles Hitler.

Speaking of the latter:  One of the most perversely brilliant things the Fuhrer (or, more precisely, his propoganda minister, Joseph Goebbels) did was to foster the perception that the burning of homes and looting of buinesses belonging to Jews in Germany, Austria and the annexed areas of adjacent countries--and the killing of some of those Jews--was a spontaneous popular uprising in response to a young Polish Jew's assassination of a German embassy official stationed in Paris.  

It is often argued that this deception is what rallied young Germans to "defend" their country. What it did, of course, was plunge the world into darkness. Hmm...Where else have we seen anything like that?

As for being plunged in darkness:  On this same date in 1965, nine northeastern US states and parts of Canada experienced the largest blackout when a switch in a power station in Niagara Falls failed.  I remember that one well:  I was seven years old and, being accustomed to seeing my Brooklyn neighborhood illuminated by tall streetlamps and light from neighbors' windows, simply could not comprehend what had just happened.  Nor, for that matter, could most of the adults in my neighborhood.  

What I recall most clearly, though, is my father not coming home from work that night.  I think it was the first time I experienced that.  He, like many others, took the subway to and from his job in Manhattan.  Thankfully, he hadn't yet boarded a train before the lights went out and was thus spared being marooned in a pitch-black tunnel as so many other commuters were that evening!

What I wouldn't know, until much later, was that on that same day in 1965, a former seminarian named Roger LaPorte immolated himself in front of the United Nations in protest of the Vietnam War.

Believe it or not, the events I've mentioned aren't the only  ones of note to have happened on this date:   Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself the dictator of France.  Teddy Roosevelt left the White House for what would be the first official visit outside the US by an American President.  The Kaiser abidicated and fled to the Netherlands as Germany declared itself a republic.  And the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev was born.  As if he needed more material to work with!

To The Rescue (Or, At Least, A Happy Ending)

Plot spoiler:  Today’s ride turned into a rescue mission.

The tide crept away,  leaving an egret in distress

stuck in a sea of moss while other birds are left to wander lonely in the sands.

Would help arrive in time?

Or would they be submerged in the incoming tide?

Fortunately, our heroine arrived in the nick of time 

on her winged chariot (well, a fast bike, anyway!)

All are saved.  And our heroine is enjoying a feast befitting a queen.  Everyone lives happily ever after—until the next fairy tale, anyway!

(Now you know that a fairy tale is even better with a cyclist in it, especially when the heroine rides in on a shining Mercian.)

The Real Dance In DUMBO

On my way home tonight, I saw something that stopped my tires dead in the cracks of the DUMBO cobblestones.

All right, I stopped the bike--for what I saw while pedaling and getting vibrated on that Brooklyn street.


 Tonight the moon was so full and bright, even with scrims of clouds drifting across it, that I could see my reflection in my Velo Orange hammered fenders.  All right, that's a bit of an exaggeration.  But the moon was definitely not shy tonight:

It seemed to be guiding the other lights of the sky and street, moving close and pulling away, allowing only glimpses of its face as it continued its dance with the other orbs of light.

I apologize for the quality (or lack thereof) of these photos:  I took them with my cell phone!

The End Of A Legend: R.I.P. Jack Taylor

Last week, I wrote a post about a Jack Taylor "Rough Stuff" bicycle designed in the 1950s and built, apparently, during the 1970s.

Jack Taylor (l) with brothers Ken and Norman

Well, the man whose name that bike bore died on Sunday.  Jack Taylor, who started building bicycles as a teenager in 1936.  At the time, he raced in the then-vibrant club racing scene in his native England.  According to legend (who started it, I don't know), he admired some high-end equipment but couldn't afford it.  So he set out to making it himself.

In the beginning, his friends Lance Bell and Jack Hood helped him.  At the end of the war, in 1945, his brothers Ken and Norman joined him to form Jack  Taylor Cycles.  Interestingly, Norman would come to be the actual frame-builder and Ken would build wheels, assemble the bikes and box them for shipping.  On each of those boxes--many of which went to the USA--Ken wrote, "Have a nice ride".  If I were a collector, I'd probably want one of those boxes almost as much as I'd want one of their bikes!

Jack, however, was the one who ensured you could tell a Jack Taylor--whether a racing, touring or "rough stuff" bike, or a tandem--from any other.  He's the one who gave the bikes their beautiful paint finishes and the box pinstriping that became his "signature", if you will.

That Jack Taylor stood out in a time and country with so many first-rate bike builders is a testament to, not only his (and his brothers') workmanship, but the ride and designs of their bikes.  They used geometries and configurations (such as curved seat tubes) that were previously all but unknown.  Among those configurations is the "Rough Stuff" frame I showed in my earlier post:  It has most of the major design elements of a modern mountain bike (high bottom bracket, sloping top tube, smaller-than-700C wheels) but was designed two decades before Gary Fisher, Joe Breeze, Keith Bontrager and the mountain-bike pioneers started barreling down Marin County fire trails on old Schwinn balloon-tired bombers.

Perhaps the most interesting Jack Taylor bikes--and the ones for which he is most renowned--are his touring bikes and tandems.  Those bikes are also the reason why JT was often called "the most French" of English bike builders.  The features that made them so well-suited to their purposes were adapted from constructeurs like Rene Herse, Alex Singer and Goeland:  frame geometries, integrated racks and fenders, oversized headsets and down tubes and brazed-on cantilever brakes, which hadn't been used much in England before JT started using them.

Many Taylor bikes (of all kinds) were also built without lugs in a technique called "filet brazing" or "bronze welding" which made the frames look as if they were sculpted from one piece of metal and polished.  (My  old Land Shark was constructed that way.)  Jack admitted that, as much as it made some of his bikes look as if they were built by one of the constructeurs, he did it because lugs and some other materials were scarce during the years just after the war.  However, even after he had an easier time finding the lugs he liked, he continued to make many of his bikes without them. Sometimes customers preferred them that way. But, more important, it allowed for greater flexibility in design:  an especially important point when building tandems.

Just about all Jack Taylors were built from Reynolds 531 tubing.  Jack developed a close relationship with the company.  For one thing, it guaranteed his supply.  But more important, it meant that Reynolds would make variations on their tubing--such as the curved and oversized tubes--to suit Taylors' unique designs.  In fact, Reynolds made some configurations of their tubing for Jack Taylor an no one else.

Jack retired in 1990, but Norman--who died six years ago at the age of 84--continued to build frames for another decade or so.  They had the same build quality as the older bikes, but because the paint and finish work was outsourced, they did not have the unique, distinctive beauty of the earlier bikes.

So goes another legend of the cycling world.  You can read another tribute (possibly better than mine) on a favorite blog of mine:  The Retrogrouch.