Coming In On His White "Horse"

Today is the twelfth day of Christmas.  So this is my last chance to lament Santa Claus's misuse of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.  But I will refrain.  Poor Rudolph has suffered enough already.  So have you, if you've read my posts on the subject.

Instead of Rudolph, I'm going to talk about a white horse.  If someone were to ride one through the most central part of a city, along its busiest streets, how would people react?

Perhaps they would stop and stare in misbelief the way residents of Bushwick, Brooklyn did when Tammy and I rode down Knickerbocker Avenue one summer Sunday afternoon some time around 2000.  That was a few years before the Williamsburg hipsters started to cross Flushing Avenue because they could no longer afford those Williamsburg apartments they helped to make unaffordable.

But I digress.  Karnchanit Poswat rode his white "horse" through a busy area of Bangkok, his home city.  




Before you watched the video, you had already figured out that the "horse" was really a bicycle made to look like an equine--because you're smart. (Why else would you read this blog?)  Mr. Poswat, who studied film and video in his home country of Thailand,  has also made performace art recordings as well as a video about Buddhism.

So...Knowing what I've just mentioned, I think it's fair to ask:  Does the "horse" video have a deeper meaning?  Or is it a joke?  It just might be neither, or both.

Do other people in Thailand handle horses as well as Poswat handles his? If they do, it might be the reason why Siam (as Thailand was formerly known) was never colonized by Europeans, even though it's between Burma (conquered by the British) and French Indo-China.

Even if those "horses" were bicycles.

Tiagra Is Top-Of-The-Line. Really!

Some of you may be riding bikes equipped with Shimano Tiagra components. In the hierarchy of the world's largest component maker, it is fourth in the six levels of road components--one level below the 105 (which, along with the Deore LX, its mountain-bike counterpart, has long offered Shimano's best value for the money, in my opinion) and one level above Sora.  So. if you have Tiagra, you have good stuff that functions well, though it might not last as long as Shimano's better lines--Ultegra/600 and Dura-Ace for the road and Deore XT and XTR for mountain bikes.

I have long known that, in addition to bike parts, Shimano also makes fishing equipment.  Not being a fisherperson myself, I hardly paid attention.  However, when looking for a diagram of a Shimano derailleur, I came across this:

It's a Tiagra, though obviously not one you're riding.  Actually, there are several different models of Tiagra.  Like the one in the photo, they're made for deep-sea fishing.  None of them are cheap, but from what I understand, they are among the best, if not the best, deep sea fishing reels  available.

And, I must say, they are beautiful, though I have to wonder how they (or any other reel used in deep sea conditions) would keep their looks.  To be fair, I think most fisherpeople aren't as inclined to buy their equipment for aesthetics as some cyclists are. Or, perhaps, they define beauty in a different way.

I think it's interesting that, for one sport, Shimano gives its top-of-the-line models the same model name as the one that appears on mid-level equipment for another sport.

Who Needs The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, Anyway?

In my youth, someone gave me a subscription to Sports Illustrated.  I don't know how long it was supposed to last, but I think I recieved every issue from the day my first puberty began until I was engaged.  I don't remember why I didn't renew it.  Perhaps, not having a lot of money, I had to choose between it and and something else--was it a Campagnolo part?  Or something my fiancee and I would need for our new household?

Whatever the reason for my cancellation, it had nothing to do with the most popular issue published every year.  Back then, it was released in January, around the second or third week.  By now, you probably know what I'm talking about:  The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.

I was not at all interested in the very scantily-clad images of Cheryl Tiegs and and Carol Alt and Elle Macpherson posing in exotic locales.  Really, I wasn't.  I was reading about the NBA and NHL All-Star games, which were usually played around the time The Issue came out.

I swear it's true.... ;-)  

Anyway...I was reminded of the SISI when I saw this:

Can you say, "Ooh-la-la"?  About the bicycle, I mean?

Seriously, Abbey Lee Kershaw looks great on or with--or without--any bike.  But take a look at those fenders. Those reflectors  The bags on the sides of the rack.  They're almost as cool as the tatoo on her ankle. (And I don't even like tatoos, generally.

There's one problem, though, with those photos.  No outfit is complete without a faabulous pair of shoes.  For Abbey Lee, they wouldn't be just a fashion statement.  I mean, would you ride those pedals barefoot?

Really, now.  

Did You Make A New Year's Resolution?

You know all of the most common New Year's Resolutions:  go on a diet, drink less, stop smoking, learn a foreign language, get a better job (or start a new career or business), return to school, be nicer to people-- and never, ever make a New Year's Resolution ever again.  

You've probably made at least one of these at some point or another in your life--or when the clock struck midnight the other night.  ("I will stop drinking," she said while sipping champagne.)  And, if you're typical, it lasted about two weeks.

Somehow I think cycling-related resolutions last longer. Usually, they involve riding more or doing more challenging--or simply different kinds of--rides.  People who make such resolutions are, typically, already cycling (or are motivated to do so) and have riding partners or belong to cycling clubs.  Common sense and basic psychology (Believe it or not, they're not mutually exclusive!) tell us it's easier to stick with something you're already doing than to start it, than it is to start something and keep moving ahead with it when we encounter the first "bump in the road".

From The Bike Cafe

Another reason, I think, cycling-related resolutions made by cyclists are more likely to be kept is that tend to be more specific than something like, "I will be a kinder person".  That doesn't surprise me:  Over the years, I've noticed that students who have a specific or particular goal, whether it's becoming an accountant, auteur or anaesthesiologist, are more likely to stay in school and complete their degrees than those who have some vague sense that they need a degree to get a job that pays well (an increasingly dubious proposition these days) or because their parents, friends or communities want them to become an "educated" person.

Now I'll confess that I didn't make any resolution, cycling- related or otherwise.  In fact, I haven't made one in a long time.  If I recall correctly, I made my last resolution before I discovered this poem:

      For The Coming Year
         --by Peter Everwine

      With the stars
      rising again in my han

      Let my left arm be a rooster
      it will keep the watches of the night

      And let my right arm be an axe
      it will be sleepless in the gate of morning

      When I fold them to me
      they will take things into their circle

      They will sing softly to each other
      softly

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

From NBX/Narragansett Bikes

A Reflection On 2015

I know that for many people, 2015 has been a terrible, tragic year.  I feel their pain, not in the least because at least one devastating event touched my life, if only tangentially.

Still, this year has been a very good year for me---the best since my surgery, and possibly before that--in many ways.  Cycling has had much to do with that.

Of course, riding to and from museums and cafes, along rivers, canals and boulevards, and through new experiences as well as memories, in Montreal and Paris can make just about anybody's year.  What really made those events, and much else in my life, special this year is an observation my friend Jay made while we had lunch in the City of Light: "You seem very settled as a woman now."  


The last time we'd met before then, I was in the early stages of my gender transition.  I was still acting and dressing in ways I was "supposed" to.  To be more precise, I was trying to show that I wasn't a man. (That, after I'd spent so much of my life trying to prove the exact opposite!)  At that point in my life, I really wondered whether I could or wanted to continue cycling. For one thing, I knew that I couldn't continue to ride in the way in which I'd been accustomed.  More important, though, I still believed that my transition meant "killing", if you will, the man named Nick I had lived as.  For that reason, I also wondered whether I would continue teaching although most people don't think of it as a particularly "masculine" occupation.

Since then, I have come to realized that cycling and teaching, as well as writing and even my taste in foods, are not part of one gender or another; they are part of my identity.  In other words, they intertwine with other things to make me who I am.  When anything is so integral to your life, you don't dispose or efface it; it changes with you or you change it as you are changing yourself.  So, perhaps, the way you execute or express them changes.  

In my case, pedaling up a hill or writing an essay or poem is no longer a conquest or even a goal met; it is an accomplishment, on whatever scale. Sometimes I still think about how Nick would have seen all of this--he wouldn't have approved, I'm sure--but I feel compassion for him.  After all, he couldn't have understood that he was, even then, becoming me.   Yes, she was becoming her mother!

It's fun, really. And the cycling has gotten better. That's what 2015 means to me right now.

How Important Is The Bicycle To Women's History?

In a post I wrote three years ago, I relayed one of the most striking insights Susan B. Anthony offered:
   
    "Let me tell you what I think of bicycling.  It has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.  It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance."

Yesterday, I came across this:

     "Advertisements, magazines and posters promoted the image of the New Woman, just as other forms of mass media would later exhibit images of the flapper, the housewife, the wartime worker, and the androgynous feminist.  The bicycle was the symbol of the New Woman's freedom outside the home, as she raced off with her friends--men or women--down city streets and into the countryside."

Obviously, that didn't come from Ms. Anthony.  It did, however, come from a source that's intersting, if not as much so as, and for different reasons from, the godmother of feminism as we know it.

The second quote is the only mention of the bicycle in The Social Sex:  A History of Female Friendships, by Marilyn Yalom with Theresa Donovan Brown.  Dr. Yalom is a former Professor of French and senior scholar at the Clayman Institute of Gender Research at Stanford University. Ms. Donovan Brown is a former speechwriter and ran a financial communications firm.

I strongly suspect that Dr. Yalom supplied most of the information and Ms. Donovan Brown did most of the writing.  After all, the section on women's friendships and the salons of 17th Century France contains ideas and insights that only someone who read the sources in the original could have gleaned.  And the prose flows freely--like, well, a good speech.

Therein lies both the book's strengths and flaws.  While Donovan Brown's prose flows freely, it often lacks depth.  While Yalom's research provides the reader with glimpses into the nature of the relationships described in the book, and shines a light onto documents that might otherwise have been lost, those documents (letters, stories, essays and novels) come almost entirely from women (and, in a few cases, men) from, or with connections to, the upper classes.  That, perhaps, is not Dr. Yalom's fault, as most women who weren't part of those classes were illiterate until the 19th Century and rarely went to college before World War II.

Still, the book is an engaging and, at times, interesting read.  It won't turn you into a scholar or an expert, but it's a good starting point for anyone who wants to read more about relationships or women's history.  Finally, there is something to be said for any piece of writing that reminds readers of the importance of the bicycle in changing women's lives, however brief and fleeting that reminder might be.

An Autobahn For Bicycles In The Ruhr

Whenever I've ridden the Five Boro Bike Tour, the best parts were (for me, anyway), the sections on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the lower deck of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.  That ride is the only occasion on which cycling is allowed on those roadways.  The views of New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, Manhattan skyline and Brooklyn's brownstone neighborhoods are most enjoyable.  But what makes it exhilarating is taking over, if only for a couple of hours, roadways on which motorized vehicles with four or more wheels hold a monopoly the rest of the time.

I am sure that along the way, someone probably thought, "Hmm...Wouldn't it be great to have a highway like this only for cyclists?"

Turns out, for about the past decade or so, municipalities and other jurisdictions in Europe have been working on the idea.  Short bicycle highways of 5 to 20 kilometers have been built in the Netherlands and Denmark (where else?) and the city of London is looking at the idea of building one. 

The new Ruhr Valley bicycle "autobahn".

Now Germany has opened its first stretch of its first bicycle "autobahn".  Five kilometers long, it will eventually be part of a planned 100-kilometer bikeway that will connect the cities of Duisberg, Hamm and Bochum--and four universities--in the Ruhr Valley.

In the meantime, Frankfurt--Germany's banking center--is planning a 30-kilometer route south to Darmstadt.  Munich is working on a 15-kilometer thoroughfare to its northern suburbs and Nuremberg is launching a feasibility study for a path that will connect to four other cities in the eastern part of the country.  Earlier this month, Berlin's city administration gave the green-light to conducting a feasibility study for a bike highway connecting the city center with the leafy suburb of Zehlendorf.

One way in which the newly-opened Ruhr roadway could serve as a model for future projects is that it's built along a disused railway, something found in abundance in declining industrial areas like the Ruhr.  On the other hand, the Berlin project points to an obstacle that too often bedevils such plans:  Who will pay for it?

The German capital is, almost paradoxically, the poorest of the country's major cities. So there is objection to the project, and others like it, especially among conservatives.  One problem is that, as in many other countries, the federal (or national) government builds and maintains motor-, rail- and water-ways, while cycling and pedestrian facilities are the responsibility of local governments.  If those localities are heavily endebted, as Berlin is, other funding schemes must be proposed.  The conservative CDU party has suggested placing billboards along the way:  something almost no cyclist, and very few other citizens, support.


Similar roadblocks detour or stop bicycle lane construction here in the US, and the same sorts of people (conservatives, mainly) oppose--or, at least, don't want to pay for--it.

If such obstacles can be overcome, it may one day be possible to ride from New York to San Francisco without stopping for a traffic light--without a speed limit, of course!

My Christmas Lights Tour

Perhaps your city has a Christmas Lights Tour.  If it doesn't, and you've never heard of the concept, give you a brief description.  You buy a ticket, get into a bus or van that takes you past the most beautifully or ostentatiously decorated houses.

And trust me, the stereotype about the most over-decorated houses belonging to Italian-Americans is mostly true.  As you can tell from my last name, my heritage (most of it, anyway) comes from the "boot".  That makes me an authority on such things.  Really!  Oh, and my family's house would have been part of one of those tours, had anybody come up with the idea of running them back then.

I don't think I will ever put so much time and effort into stringing lights and putting up props that will be taken down a couple of weeks later.  Also, even if I were to become rich, I wouldn't want to pay the electric bills the owners of those houses run up.  But I can look at them---from my Brooks saddle.

You see where this is going:  I did a "lights" tour on my bike.  I didn't stray very far from my place.  But I put in a couple of hours of riding to see these:

First, I pedaled to 2179 25th Avenue in Astoria.  I first discovered this place during the first Christmas season I spent, six years ago, in my current place.  

I am alwas amazed at how the owner of the house manages to turn the front into a collection of little Christmas dioramas.

Wherever I start, and in whichever direction I go, every "panel" seems more wonderful and elaborate than the last.  

Hey, you can even watch the umpteenth rerun of "Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer"!:

I would say that the owner of this house certainly gives the neighborhood a gift every Christmas:

From this place, I rode to "thirty by thirty":  the corner of 30th Street and 30th Road:

The four-colored lights look simple. But I like the way they're arranged.  From the front, they give this house an almost-Asian look:

Finally, back to my block.  Interesting, isn't it, how two adjoining row houses can have such different styles of decorating:

Reflective Tape--Or Ruban Conspicuitif?

As a college instructor in New York, I teach, and have taught, many students whose first language is not English.  Some were and are wonderful writers and spoke the language very well, if with an accent.  Others, however, couldn't read much more than a telephone directory in the language of a country and city to which they try so hard to adapt.

Perhaps the most interesting of the non-native speakers I've encountered are the ones who can make themselves understood most of the time, but express what they are trying to say in ways no native speaker ever would.  As often as not, they are thinking in their native languages, which they translate literally, sometimes with the aid of electronic devices.  Sometimes this results in their using words that actually exist in the English language but you would rarely, if ever, hear in conversation.

I came across such a word in, of all places, an eBay listing for "conspicuity" tape.  Most of us in the English-speaking world would refer to it as "reflective" tape.  

"Conspicuity" Tapes

The seller is in China.  Now, I am not familiar with any of that country's languages, but I am guessing that whatever character they have in Mandarin or Cantonese or Fujian for what the seller was trying to say would translate, at least literally, into "conspicuity."  Now, perhaps you are more educated or literate than I am, but I feel confident that it's not a word you use very often.  I can't recall ever having used it at all.

To be fair, the word "reflective" can also mean "contemplative", and the word's literal translation into the seller's native language might reflect (no pun intended) that meaning more closely.  Also, to be fair,the seller did use the words "reflective," "safety" and "warning" in the listing title.  I guess he or she was trying to cover all bases, as the words "tape," "film" and "sticker" are also included.  

That last part  also interesting (at least to me) because I know that adhesive tapes--like hadlebar wraps as well as first-aid tapes--are referred to as "rubans adhesifs"--adhesive bands--in French.  On the other hand, the Velox "rim tape" you use on your Mavic rims is a "fond de jante"--rim base, or foundation.

Should I ask the seller of "conspicuity" tape whether he or she has "rim tape"?