Extra! Extra!

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

When you get to be "a certain age", you find yourself making reference to something everyone in your generation understands--whether it's some bit of pop or haute culture, technology or something that was in the news--and young people have absolutely no idea of what you're talking about.

It happens all the time when I teach.  I am thinking now about the time I mentioned Hunter Thompson, just after his suicide.  Although he was hardly forgotten, at least to folks of my generation, my students hadn't grown up reading is articles (mainly in Rolling Stone--yes, we actually thought it was halfway relevant, for a time!) and books.  Explaining him, of course, led to explaining other things my students had heard, but didn't know about, like Watergate and why so many of us thought Richard Nixon was evil incarnate.  (Before he turned into a parody of himself, Garry Wills brilliantly showed how Tricky Dick was a tragically ambitious character who would have fit into Paradise Lost or Macbeth.)  Although I went off the day's ostensible topic--I forget what it was--the discussion proved fruitful for some of the works students read that semester.

Anyway, another time I had to lead my students out of the wilderness, so to speak, was when I said "Extra! Extra!" Since most young people don't read print newspapers, they aren't familiar with many of the tropes of that medium.  Then again, I'm not sure that any newspaper has used "Extra! Extra!" in its banner--or that any hawker has shouted "Read All About It!" in a few decades!

I must say, though, that I am suspicious whenever any bicycle component has "extra" his name.  Perhaps my prejudice stems from the Regina Extra freewheel that turned into a block of six fixed gears during a ride.   In fact, many of Regina's other products--all of which, in my experience, were overrated--had "Extra" in their name.  So did the Campagnolo Valentino Extra, a derailleur introduced about a decade too late.  When it came out, a SunTour or Shimano derailleur that shifted much better could be had for about half the cost of a Campy VE.

Speaking of derailleurs with "Extra" in their name, check this out:

If you are North American--or, in fact, from anyplace besides Europe--you've probably never seen it.  I have seen only one of those derailleurs in person--in Italy about 30 years ago.  For that matter, if you're not in the Euro zone, you've probably never seen anything else made by the company that made that derailleur.

When you think of Spanish bikes and components today, you probably think of Orbea.  If you are my age, you might remember (or perhaps even rode) equipment from Zeus, which made clones of popular European parts like Stronglight and Specialites TA cranks, Weinmann and Mafac brakes--and, of course, Campagnolo derailleurs.  In the late 1970s and early 1980s, they made their "2000" line of components, which include their iconic black-and-gold anodized derailleurs and the hourglass-shaped hubs that would be imitated by other hub-makers.

Zeus was based in Eibar, in the Basque region.  In that same town, another component manufacturer turned out cruder versions of what Zeus made--and the derailleur you see in the photo.  And its name sounds more like a type of luxury condominium than that of any enterprise in the bicycle industry.

Officially, that company was called Industrias Baskaran. But it was better known as Triplex.  Why that name was chosen, I don't know.   It's about as un-Basque (or -Spanish, for that matter) as any name can be.  Then again, the Basque language is completely unrelated to any other in the world.

Although they produced a full range of components and accessories (including water bottles and cages that, not surprisingly, copied Specialites TA and REG designs), Triplex is best known--for better and worse--for its derailleurs.  As far as I know, no American, British or Japanese bike was ever equipped with them.  A number of Spanish and French bikes, however, were adorned with them. 

The reason is fairly obvious.  Take away the screaming red "Extra" emblem and the derailleur looks like--a Campagnolo Sport, at least from a couple of meters (remember, we're talking about European bikes) away.  Other Triplex derailleurs bore an even closer resemblance to Campagnolo's iconic derailleurs, which spawned any number of imitators.

Disraeligears, Classic Rendezvous and VeloBase are among the few sources of information available for Triplex, which seems to have stopped making bike parts some time around 2005.   They have become "Distriplex" (hmm....), an importer and distrubutor of components. Its website is available only in Spanish and French, but its "Nouveautes" (new products) page contains some Latin gibberish!

Then again, more people outside Eibar would understand it than would understand anything in Basque!  And more people would recognize something that looks like a Campy derailleur than something emblazoned with "Extra! Extra!  Read All About It!"

I Love Tires, Too!

Last week, I mentioned John Boyd Dunlop, the inventor of the pneumatic tire.  It is, without a doubt, the single most important innovation in the history of cycling--and one of the most important in the history of technology.  

Supposedly, he invented it to appease his son, who complained about the harsh ride of the tricycle he'd just received for his birthday.  

If that story is true, let's hope the son's reaction is something like this:

Neutral Tones

This semester, and last, I assigned--among other things--Thomas Hardy's poem "Neutral Tones" in my intro literature classes. 

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
—They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing …

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

Where I live, and where I rode yesterday, can hardly be compared to Hardy's Wessex countryside--which, actually, wa even deader than the love lamented by the speaker of his poem.  Wessex was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom the Danes invaded a millenium before Hardy started writing.  Today it consists of Dorset, where Hardy lived most of his life, and neighboring counties in southern England.

But we are entering our season of "neutral tones":  the incandescent of Fall has burned away, and even the lastflickering and smoldering hues of dying embers have faded away.  Here in New York, we can see some of those "neutral tones" in the trees, even in the light of the sky--and manmade structures:

It wasn't particularly cold, though the temperature was beginning a precipitous drop, propelled by the wind, that would continue through the night and this morning.  So, I was the only cyclist--and one of only a few people--on the waterfront park just south of the Brooklyn Bridge.

I am not lamenting a lost love--or much of anything, really--right now.  I am just tired from the heavy workload I took on during the past few months--and from the election and the ensuing tumult.  All right, maybe I am ruing the relative civility, and concern for the truth-- or, at least, the appearance of those things-- of the past few years.

The other night, I was having a conversation with someone I've come to know a bit during the past few months.  We both agreed that we are now in a completely different world from the one in which we first met:  as I recall, some time late in the summer.  We can see it in the faces of people; most important, we can feel it, we agreed:  the air of resignation and defeat in places like the neighborhood in which I work, and the belligerence (manifested in an increasing number of attacks against people who are, or look like, Muslims, LGBT people or anyone Trump scorned or mocked) in other places.  

"But you know, we created all of that.  Everyone did.  Just as Americans created the Soviet Union as much as those folks in the Kremlin did."

I reflected on that observation as I stopped along the Brooklyn waterfront.  Obviously, humans created that bridge--which I love.  But we also made the "neutral tones" of that sky and the trees.  The hues were those of winter until we made them neutral--when, as in Hardy's poem, love is lost or, worse, abandoned. 

I had another insight, for whatever it's worth, about why Christian (white ones, anyway) and Jewish fundamentalists voted for Trump.  He famously declared climate change a "hoax".  (His unique spin, of course, was to attribute the ruse to the Chinese.) The religious folk might not like the fact that he made much of his fortune from casinos and other unsavory businesses, and that he's been married three times--or that his views on abortion are those of the last person who discussed the issue with him.  But what he said about climate change aligns completely with the most fundamental tenet of Abrahamic religions (as I understand them, anyway):  that of God's sovereignty.  That notion is challenged, to say the least, if you believe that human-generated pollution can cause a rise in sea levels and average temperatures, and can wipe out entire species. 

And to think that Trump came from the same city I inhabit!

Then again, I don't think he ever took a bike ride along the Brooklyn waterfront on a winter afternoon--and saw what I saw.